absurd city: work-in-progress

rosy-fingered dawn
 
with its tendrilled
        smoke-filled face                  
            turns away from us now
                  gathers its whirling  
unhemmed robes
 
from up and down  
      north south  
            there then
 
and refuses to issue forth again
      lies in a heap, expires,
               and already it's half-past ten
 
let me sing to you,  
absurd city
     awash with your surreal rubble
           the bones of children  
              hung out on drooping
                  lines to unflesh  
                        dry and gather flies
 
it's how it is now
        in this place which has  
            no meaning                                                   
                         no end
 
only the to-be-continued
 
again
and again
 
rosy-fingered dawn smearing a red line
along the contours of the broken horizon
 
as the smoked-covered city
rises arrayed as a bar-chart might rise
 
      from yesterday's mass grave
                        robbed of all meaning
leaning, listing, listening


O poet, they cry, speak of
      other things/other times/
            other whens  
                  when there were different whys  
when the skies were
      not smoky
            all day
 
when we still knew how
      to gaze as lovers  
            praise the memories
 
that were called forth
     and were different then
            way back when  
it was  
somehow
different
 
 
can i speak of this  
      without you thinking
            me rude? or speak  
            of the crudeness
of who we've become
 
our innured eyes  
      our worn-out hearts
 
our palsied silliness  
      which we put in songs
                 of who we'll fuck next
                  to heal our inner wounds      
 
as we suck our bongs
  and attempt to make it
     all go away in a cloud
            of disenchanted gray
 
as huge throngs of the dispossessed
      hit crack pipes stuffed with wrongs
            and nihilistic
                  don't-give-a-fuck songs
 
I am an old man.
    So tell me what I should say
which will assuage  
      your sensitive little hearts
            and make your owies
                  go away?
 
I do not know the way
      to san jose
                or to your safe spaces
 
I do not care about your
      comfort zones
 
and is there any one or two or three
    or however many utterances which can
          make one jot or tittle                                           
                  of the law of entropy
                        disobey?
it can't
 
you won't
you can't
 
so walk on by
and cast your bread
on the uncaring wind
which goeth whithersoever
it listeth.
 
 
tell us that, mr d,