EXILES
All your life you hope to inherit a heart,
a native down-home greenery that stays until the old life is gone,
and evaporated sea and sky reveal dried salt.
The terror comes like a midnight resonance, whirls in trees,
a show of things invisible in swirling darkness,
winds that eat the packaged, consumable cloudsthat fly to corners of a half moon's grin.
Swooping nearly to earth,
it means to sweep you back to province
where the struggle to breathe supports a vortex in your absence.
Under the balance of the sky, of laurel and tiger lily,
spreading there on the mountain, speaking of quiet return,
you will ask your experience what can elevate you.
Do we come back when we run out of robot grease
and commercial value, when our symbol loses hip ness,
and there is nothing left but arthritis and a feeling of artistic freedom?
We will run to the mountain that points to the gray rain
and to the northern peak tinted medicine blue, lined with quaint shops,
and the southern one, also, the one flowing molten gold.
We will not know what we see, having no such education,
no such picture of what the soul really sees,
but we will capture the song of the musty vegetation,
busses floating along with stick-like pointing spirits.
Some of us begin to toy with epitaphs:
o how I roared in my time and still managed
to taste a few examples of everything,and oh, how it made me a fierce vessel. ...Save my watch.
My work was only meant to give back its collection
of tempered metals, not gold. To give back spirit
would have meant that I start with my impossible lead. (Pb)
Aren't we happy in the design of things people sell for profit?
Don't we know enough to enjoy what money makes,
what everyone wants? Aren't we happy
as tiny men in the shadow of the blue-green mountain?
II. seeking another reality
Some of us will yearn for the far planet at the other end of the universe,
and a few of us, waiting for the mail ship, will write sad letters from there.
Each of our vices will seem like a small thing, squirming in the earth.
Give us costume and color to clothe a revelation,
to spark the green dance of electrons, not to burn in our updraft,
but to live by one's own light, never-mind how dull or feeble.
Welcome philistines and dilettanti alike, usher them in from their
suffocating, spiritual isolation, point out the cocooning booths
and studio apartments for the final cyber-exile adventure.
The virtual heart-wounded billions
who flee into cyber woes
will keep up the war's killer bandwidth,
going mad in the struggle for words,
perpetuating the flow of warm electrons.
But, to end transmission,
there in the cyber gloom, beyond escape,
on line in the loving arms of a techno vision,
the latest exile, in a vogue bombardment of the senses
alone with an awesome love of death,
compares to a dear-god fear of our own humanity,
hollering at its grave computer mishap
as the onslaught of all Mongolia
swings from the chat room rafters.
In the smart-home, computerized island,
glistening far in the distance,
removed from elements of street,
we languish in spent audio, or tap into subterranean,
off-beat lines of network infra-structure.
The underground realm respects a peculiar haircut,
excuses us for the bad remarks we make in public,
and lets us indulge that deeper depression that levity cannot lift.
By the hours people will point and click those doors,
unhinge the city-life, secret gardeners and hemlock,
step from private transportation
into playthings and the fever of present tense.
With nothing else to work for,
what will convenience make us? Instant poets?
Our goods of the earth on hand
and the grand search concluded,
do we simply come to end of file,
the spool of life flapping, end of reel?
III. the paradise
What IS the paradise we approach nervously,
or hope to avoid like a new-age plague at the edge of wilderness?
Like exiles, we are put ashore, banished to the virus-belt equator.
Here, the stranger is not understood, politically belongs to silence.
His thoughts ring like the desk bells of the hotel management,
and his quick friends who dined and sang, leave at dawn, forever.
Romantic strangeness prevails like a westerly zephyr
as water levels rise, and the warming globe claims more green,
though body parts still laugh and prickle from the brine.
Paradise is having a much tighter grip on the proverbial hand-basket,
feeling a stronger, bravo connection with same ole earth, spirits tuned in
despite the exaggerated broadcast news of her going straight to hell.
ŠJimmy Warner Design, 2010
