The Awakening
(“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which
I am trying to awake.” Ulysses, James Joyce)
And if you go far enough
and live long enough,
you shall come at last
to where the remaining bodies
are excavated below
empty malls and coliseums.
There you will find a truth
windy and decomposed
unlike any small sorrow
you have personally known.
The great human record:
the archives of deconstruction.
The Auschwitz of Nicolai Ceausecu.
The bloody shoe-closet of Imelda Marcos.
Chernobyl and the killing fields
of Bosnia, Hiroshima and Waterloo.
The long, inhuman legacy
of ego, fear, greed
and testosterone.
On a good day, madre
the sun may shine on your garden
and you shall hear birdsong
and feel the rhythms of imagined desire:
blue/green, or so it goes…
Enjoy your latte moment.
You’ve earned it, love.
Put jam on the unthinking
scones of ignorance.
Pretend and above all pray
to something larger and better
than this or your self.
Pray that some walls will
remain standing after all
you’ve ever said or not done.
Ponder for once now
the pillars and dreams
of the multitudinous dead.