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.
