Myself even in such silence
Still manufactured,
Escaped to a back alley,
Where only a feeling of forgetfulness—
As if the entire forgetting
of the townspeople’s motions
Finds its way here—
And a wish for silence died,
And in the twitching quietude buzzes a generator,
The constant droning of insistence
Upon forward,
The sameness of forwardness,
The sameness of its hopeful newness,
The continuing lines of the wires hugging the buildings,
The pipes, blasting also onward,
Still and away from any dream,
Yet opened at the end,
Suggesting their own
Belch of being into the world,
Like it is all more impacting than I am,
As I only pass through this moment
And then out into the dark question,
While the construct—
The only proof that something like Me was here—
Continues toward its meaning
As the leftovers of humanity,
An ended or awoken moment of wonder,
When no wish from a back alley
Insists over the force of nature,
A hopeful unawareness of being.
Questions
Of death and madness and love and Good
Force me out of time,
Never finalized in a minute or hour or day,
Never begun nor ended—
They are growing despite time,
A perpetual, agitated process,
Until I no longer may.
They force me out of the recklessly hopeful
Continuation of the concrete and steel
Cry for attention,
The demand upon its own significance
For fear of the completeness
Which it builds toward,
And the other completeness
That it runs away from.
The final sensitivity of the killing heart.
To seek slowness fight fear,
A fear dreamed into being—
Maybe we did not want
Such manufactured meaning, significance.
Who propels this force of goodness?
Careful not to illumine their hiddenness,
As their power veils the organism,
Like way back when,
A large hard staring man who looked falling
Slapped a tambourine,
Demanding and delivering the backward pull
Of himself and his drum,
Sinking into the flooding bell of the church over the town,
Reminded of a hopefully warm communication,
The round solace and nature of the still human noise.
He went to the back corner of the lot each day,
Hiding his goodness,
Where a patch of weeds
Had broken through the forcing submission
Of the pavement and crouching,
He would stare, finding what was left,
Trusting in persistent Good,
An infinitude in the wholeness
Of only the fact of life,
Eventually he said
He was almost regretful to be living, near tears,
Because he felt he left his body
When he beat on his drum,
Or like he could leave his body—
He said he came close every time—
But the more he beat his drum,
The more bound to himself
And his unsilence he became.
Try to be good, he said, to me
After too many days of himself,
But sometimes you can’t unring the bell, he said,
So don’t think about the fact of the cage too much—
The cage, he called it.
Instead, in the organism’s humming
Over silence in the alley way,
It seems more that I rest
in the non-collective forgetting
About the cage, forced to further remember
And bury myself in its lostness.
Because the creation and the denial
Are simultaneous, I see.
Need be free of the aging purpose,
And its last breaths of good and evil
Over growth of wonder beyond time,
In the cage of time.
