23.1.16

Time and Sound

Waking to the working man music,
seeking the shadows in the sounds
of the nineteen seventies,
since we are all churned
into semi-sweet baked cookies
in the summer, flipped on
by the big thaws of winter

The Teflon dons
of the nineteen eighties
are switched on, switched off
Reagan era commands,
the hyper-Gothic rhymes,
the guitar-crunching cries
after the Berlin Walls
all falls down, down, down,
as the angel of lights
floats into the alternating
lime greens as the money
turns into big seas of digits,
feeding the Taurus bull
at the beginning of the new
century, swearing to sea salts
of ubiquitous security

Sure, you tried to turn
your sword of words
into plowshares
looking for a re-boot
and now the black raven
cries over your shoulder
as you spit and cuss and croon
like a barnyard babe, street-tough
as the last-born child,
when you are actually
the first as the second cloud
of the day rises in the sky

But you can stop the insanity
outside your door anymore
than you can disassemble
the arching winds working
on your bunker, Archie,
since the pride of sin
is to admit, at some point,
that we are all overpriced
princes of peace,
at ease, at best, but ill

~
Carry the candle carefully
across the darkened room
to let the drenching of earthly flesh
shine brightly in all cathedrals
curving into a bit of hope,
exchanged for the rope,
a horizon made dangerous
by lakes of ice clear as glass

Pythagoreans, Franklins, Da Vincis,
Miltons and Blakes: Mithras
is a self-made man,
independent of media scams ...
Oh words, words, what were the words?

If the hand signals to space
hidden from reasonable, orderly beings
were thrashed out of the tides,
to live here, then die,
the call of the crazed daemon
who saw the angels
in the great stadiums
of those profoundly humbled
by the mere disappearance
of one benevolent being,
then the cooperation of choruses,
a music made by band mates
never would have been a throng

But the whistles, the voices,
the bass were all dreamed here then.
in these ears, deadened as they are
from the tone of too many super stars

Surely, the sunlight, cutting through the rain
creating a hole in the sky,
means the game is on, a rapture, a sacred dance
on the holiest of grounds