Reality is the Irregularity of the Past.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

“Are You Still There?”

(A tribute to Jim)


There are no more spectacular words,

No more Giants; no more Curds,

From the Ancient Towers of Bone,

They left and built their Gods of Stone:


“Are you still there?”

Where have you gone? Is it time?

By the grain that turns an hour; where?

We've been, to do and gone to fly.


There are no more evidential moors,

Tied to the docks Mem’ry erased,

Across the transparency through the doors—

They ne’er existed; created to be debased.


“Are you still there?”

Behind the blinds of Origin

By the pound, the dust of Angels—

Smooth-winged fiends foragin’—


And the clowns blatantly fake,

They shake and they tease, and ask,

“Are you still there?”

We’ve gathered here today to wait.


Wait, the dead are all silvery songs,

The tongues find the night to speak,

And the glory that hast been and gone;

We’re fed from hands that clean our beaks,


The artist’s paint brush,

And the tenor’s voice;

The strummer’s guitar,

And the drunkard’s choice--


Where’s the innovative; the unique?

Where is the pioneer, and the novel?

Where is all the Originality;

Sickly, dying in its infancy.


There are no more spectacular words,

The envisioned minds have killed them all;

There are no more independent chords,

Simply nuances in their fences and their stall.


Demise is clad in mediocrity,

In the lines of a confused maelstrom;

Nature’s besmirched by idiocy,

In the cool Winter spring’s kingdom.


The burdened beasts we have consumed,

The nature of our distant light; fumed,

Here plumed like the mountain sheep’s horn,

Now fading the embers that delights the Morn,


“Are you still there?”

A writer to a reader wrote,

“Are you still there?”

Death, the poet, alas, hast spoke.

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