| Though by the path I lead
|
| The passing of time and the pouring of tea
|
| Are all I’ve lately seen
|
| O my soul
|
| Until the temporal bridge be burned
|
| Until our anchor stocks hold firm
|
| Where the hands of clocks don’t turn
|
| O my soul
|
| May our lips remain discreet
|
| While your traps are beneath our feet
|
| But how long before our tails are caught
|
| By our «free"thought?
|
| Sugar in the cane, candles low
|
| Kettle on the flame for the teapot?
|
| No I tremble at the thought
|
| Sugar in the cane, candles low
|
| Southside Flats where the upscale go
|
| I tremble at the thought!
|
| I tremble at the thought!
|
| On the Streets of Mexican Wars
|
| I battle with the
|
| Memory of a first fight
|
| In our contemptible youth
|
| I «ed White Nights
|
| Thinking that’d get rid of you
|
| And waited with a stone in my hand
|
| But you were quite right:
|
| Nature had another plan
|
| (&failed to run it by me)
|
| Nature had another plan
|
| Some other surrogate self
|
| To live in the sediment of so many somebody elses'
|
| Innumerable lives and you were right:
|
| It’s not a person who dies
|
| But worlds die inside us
|
| Sugar in the cane and the candles are low
|
| On the West End Bridge looking down at the Ohio River
|
| I tremble at the thought of what’s often referred to as 'karma.'
|
| The sugar and the candles are gone
|
| You panic like a mouse when the lights go on
|
| (I ADMIT, IT WARMS MY HEART TO WATCH YOUR WORLD FALL APART)
|
| The colorful hills talked me down from the bridge:
|
| To heck with all the drugs my parents did
|
| I’d like to meet whoever said the words we print in red
|
| With a coin in my teeth on the Mexican War Streets
|
| Rivers of sadness and mutual need
|
| In the loud desperation of social routine
|
| The rock of salvation, lightly esteemed
|
| And distance surging like oceans between us
|
| Suspended by strings over rotating wheels
|
| Via magnets and springs of Carnegie steel
|
| With representation our fashionable theme
|
| And unfathomably powerful forces
|
| Like oceans between us
|
| We have all the signs we need
|
| Do we decide not to read?
|
| My will and those who precede: the relation between
|
| Is listening beside me
|
| At night like some seismic machine
|
| While the metal vibrations of petrified men
|
| Are etched in translation by pendulum pens
|
| And the movements of underground plates
|
| Do nothing to bridge or exacerbate
|
| Oceans between us |