You won’t be passing out stones
or scorpions or wasps on the other side
of apples. You won’t be not holding
the ladder when he climbs,
or not looking when she crosses.
You’ll not wonder when you should know,
for you’ll know, though you’d rather not.
You’ll know and do what you should do
because you are who you are,
the man, at last, you were meant to be.
Our hook is hidden in no dancing fly.
It hangs above the water with no enticement but
impalement. Our strength is in stillness
and waiting.
You’ll be delighted to know that you
register anywhere in anyone’s mind,
a flicker, the wavering line.
Hardly alive in yourself, there’s a
little of you there.
Life dishes out its unbelievable burdens
except it’s totally believable
because it happens every day
I dreamed I was dead
and woke and was not.
Whose time is this time?
How much have I got?
There are forgotten reasons why
you didn’t do what you didn’t do,
but now you’ve only what still
never existed – Technicolor scenes
and whiskey ads, gunboats in Esquire,
the Senator before his subcommittee,
the microphone, people clinging
to his every word.
From where you watch he’s far away,
mute lips on a screen as sunlight
climbs the outer wall. Soon there’ll be
nothing left to catch it. It will unravel
in cold dark corners of space.
We could throw away all the clocks
and move freely through time,
get ahead of our sufferings
and swerve round them,
circle back and laugh.
Impotent suffering.
Fool.
But wouldn’t we then, even then
carry inside what we’d lost
and know it
and die?
I shook off dying
and was left undying,
but how was it other
than what I already was?
Oh, we’ll fix the car and the shower –
the car that lurches, the shower that leaks –
and clean up the piles
of crap we don’t need.
And I’ll remember my wallet
before I bike to the station,
and my hat won’t be lost
for the twenty-third time.
But and yet still
thy will
won’t be in any of it
(or will) as trains pass
and doors close
and faces watch
the city aglow.
Utrecht Journal 