A surreal poem describing a certain vision of limbo, purgatory, the afterlife, whatever. |
A few small steps past the ponderous place The sand dunes and snow banks where old vagabonds tire and terminate Where young heroes throw down their stupid swords And empty seashells drift tunelessly homeward Their circular pilgrimage done Lies the country between the kingdoms It is a vast expanse of rumination and regret, caught and captured Within the volume of a mote Here, rooms of dim concrete are slowly overtaken By oily water leaking from forsaken corners Centuries-long in the melancholic process While a witless woman sits, clicking away at a typewriter, forever Oblivious Here, broken palaces of the East invite the starved into their courts The velvet night sings to the lost men of boundless treasure, food, and wine And right when the ancient fools put goblets to their lips The mischievous desert swallows up the fortress As if it never was Here, a hopeless shifting gray canopies the European steppes Radiation touches all attempts at good green life With its cancerous trembling hand Trains bereft of passenger speed along the mountain flanks Before mutedly falling off their tracks, into the twisting mirror rivers Here, a peaceful pastel cul-de-sac is greeted one weekday's twilight By a brilliant hysterical fire, consuming every shingled roof Every silver SUV, every blonde babysitter Every tulip garden and every TV And someone somewhere in the flame howls With endless aching laughter Here, Caesar and his lieutenants round up all the slaves To put on a show with flutes and drums All they know is to toil the fields and raise the wheat So they stand awkward and empty-stomached, gazing at their naked feet They're thrown into the pits, the ovens, and the pots Baked into earthy dark cakes and boiled into viscous soups A platinum-haired page stands on the rim of a large clay vat Stirring the solution with an oar that pierces heaven So as not see or smell his ungodly work His face has been well erased Here, a forgotten American astronaut drifts Slowly in tranquility and deaf fidelity From galaxy to furthest galaxy His frozen blue face delights at each new orange star Before being sucked in and spit out of a black hole Which he has been many times before And will many times more This is where you are after your war and before your peace With energy spent and ready for rest In solemn limbo before you find your nest |