In a World With No Time for Poetry

In a world with no time for poetry
we still have to die.

It would be so convenient if we could just
turn in our badge with our
full-color picture on it, go into a room
set aside for that purpose at the
corporate office
and evaporate, our desk left in order,
instructions on the
computer for the
one who fills our
shoes.

But the earth itself is alive, its roots and its tendrils,
and even minerals are part of the food-chain
in the deep dark loam.
Air pushes itself in, shoving aside 40-story buildings
like a vaporized Jolly Green giant
to swirl around the
newly enamored, the
incessantly dejected, the old man watching at his window
for death,
the young girl wearing it next to her
skin on the
inside of her
coat.

Our bodies are ticking, their time is limited where they can
carry out the wishes and desires of the
unlimited spirit, but while they’re here

they get welts on their legs, exude fluids and
perfumes, live in a
strictly practical world, no time for
nonsense, while their

hair grows in ghost-land as long as the
anchor rope of the phantom galleon,

and minute mites like birds in branches settle down on our
eyelashes, thoughts like
ribbons of incandescence curve through us as
wide as the Niger,

and as we sit the walls around us become
obsolete, the hillside that
emerges as the
house dissolves, full of
unused warrens and
ant-entrances, blows away from

underneath us in a fine powder heading back to

The Fashioner.

---

1990 (from A Maddening Disregard for the Passage of Time)

Categories: Poems