Happiness's Entropy

            Per me si va ne la città dolente,

            per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,

            per me si va tra la perduta gente.

            They lived und laughed ant loved end left.

We spread as wildfire while it rained,

We flew as wind while the air was stale,

            Passing, fleeing —

Let us go then, to the shore,

Where sea lions bask and seagulls swoop,

And Kafka sits, trapped by the choked atmosphere

Of swirling freedom of unfreedom.

And shall we go then too, to the balcony,

Where Romeo still pines for unreasonable death,

And the view of sunset conjures visions

Of a fading brilliance, of radiant distance?

We go, then leave, then come back again,

When there is but a wasteland left, dead

Lilacs and hissing soil,

Wandering souls bound to a sinking star,

            Leaving

As we set foot once more

And tend to the wilted sad and frowns,

Resurrecting the twilight kingdom.

(Yet we can only plug up the weeping holes.)

To spin the spiral and let loose some light

            and simple sadness,

To absolve the ropes and predict with certitude

            the flames of all passion spent,

To grieve then celebrate the passing of moon

            and summer and apocalypse,

To cope with gin and joke the gates we are

            to enter through in time,

To sigh, to blind, to hide, and to yield

            to me, happiness’s entropy,

To sing a merry merry song:

            Ashes! Ashes!

            We all fall down.

Gather your will, your way, your lonely

Soon-to-be-forgotten kindness, sorrow, pity.

Follow, or be followed, to kindred darkness

Or harrowing light — provided by the

Son of Man

Sun of Man

(not God, not electricity)

            Shine, shine, forever…

Since matter has been compressed,

Prepackaged and shipped at a low flat rate,

And photons are but a lane, a means —

We are left without an end.

Compact, condense, they say!

So I say to them, to you,

With a glare of a thousand knowing eyes,

“Try fighting against the eternal entropy of happiness.”

And to this they shudder, and shrivel up,

Their warmth dissipating like an amnesiac’s past.

            “The horror! The horror!”

Let us haunt minds and caves,

(Though they are in many ways synonymous)

And dig and eat away

At strings, at mother’s,

With sharpened brutal dreams —

Passive Brutus

Murdering in silence in quietude

Under the cover of day

With delayed response

Unrealization

            Atque ita divisit eos Dominus ex illo loco in universas

            terras et cessaverunt aedificare civitatem.

And April is cruellest with his shoures sote,

Which drops piercing doles of solitude:

False contentment

False truth (untruth)

False utopian fantasies set up by dead men,

Carrying the weight of a fallen trajectory,

Like self-proclaimed prophets held up by time,

Building Babel with babble and indistinguishable murmur.

We’re suspended in the clouds, strung up,

Propped up and praised — we smile —

I clap my hands and they clap their hands,

A primitive mimicking, echoing of reversed ruins;

The Lethe has dried up,

Forestalling the inextinguishable thirst of

Universal desperation, the unyielding pursuit of nonexistent

Happiness — for happiness, like water,

Like Lear, decays, dilutes,

Binds to poison, becomes poison, evaporates:

Thinned out to a wisp of deformed memory (or was it

An illusion?), talking to no one, washing dirt with dirt,

As I am, but gladly so.

I hooked us with unanswered, unanswerable questions —

But we know not, of course, we, with hearts of persistence,

That simple solace lays out like twigs in an ocean:

            We drown,

            Adrift —

Sad boats piloted by Ozymandias,

Though dead, Unseeming in the shadows and waves,

Subjugated to whirlpools of restricted thoughts —

Singing to birds that don’t sing back,

Praying to gods that have abandoned us…

Crying for self-pitying mothers,

Selfish fathers:

“O selfish Father,

Why do you scowl in that way?

Why do you mock us so?”

To no reply, silence, listening to time passing,

As my slow proliferation leaks into

Disdain and broken dreams,

Pandora’s Box with nothing left.

            When we are born, we cry that we are come

            To this great stage of fools.

We yearn for the close that we hope is never close.

And before that, you wish for

Not Alph, but some presence for you

To console in, once you’ve dropped down

From high places to these new

Desolate plains of hot breeze and dead trees.

Find not Aeolus, not even Calypso,

But wander, be guided by my currents;

End up here, nowhere, there in the shadows.

Become a pale reflection of supposed happiness,

            Of constructed should-be’s and theories.

So let us, for a final time, wave white flags

In victory — I suppose we can only

Celebrate now, in this rotting field.

Then, in our drunkenness,

We seem to find a way out, up,

Into the sky, up to an idyllic promise of heaven.

And we climb up like Sisyphus once more, forevermore.