the tides

the descent to the depths of hilarity requires

a very real struggle to retain aloofness; when fawns

lay slaughtered on the asphalt, what is left of their

empty eyes looking straight at nothing,

splayed mercilessly

between the wheels and the vulture claws,

carcasses of dashed plans and figments of

traced trajectories, stopped, on their tracks,

what was the duration of the critical moment?

a few fateful fractions of a second? the chain

series of fraction-seconds that charted the

journey to this point; good- and bad-decision-making?

but who knows the fork-of-the-road choices

made by the big, invisible machinery?

it takes a really determined heart and mind to

avoid the empty gaze of the thwarted predator

with disinterested pathos.

the killing of sanity continues unpunished

while I cannot examine the bedrock of this abyss,

the fogged pit of unseen depth—can I grasp it?

anything but the surety of light, any time but

the moment of now, any place but the locus of

of the coordinates of agony and struggle

I am afraid of even trying comprehending it

when this

string of letter-o-graphs pronounces its own dialect

jumbled series of symbols that exclude certainty or dogma,

scoliotic lines of letter like a cobra lunching

against the glittery façade of illusion

a complexity to something we imagined we

understood — and a relentless honesty, the pouring

out of a heart that seeks redemption, an inconsolable

diatribe devoid of argument or nous, an empty vessel

of faulty reasoning that becomes a

pivot around the notion of eternal devotion

irrespective of the coming of the eschata of end of days

explicitly historical and of a palpable present moment

plastered over loud billboards and neon signs:

these are too your pains this too is your anguish