Startled by Existence

2000?

(A meditation on the difficulty of communication)

We are like that sci-fi guy speeding through galactic sky

In a ship shaped like a phone booth,

All phone booth-sized upon the hull,

But bigger than a house within.

Indeed,

We are all like grand-inflated ticks … arms

Waving tiny from our grand inner-selves

We are Macy-Day clowns the size of icebergs,

Jammed into our skin like a Jack,

And there, up in the distant sky

A bitsy-valve of a mouth like a distant dime.

They say

the tongue is a fire,

a rudder on a ship,

and Oh, …..the things that slip,

but you should hear

the things

It doesn't say.

If we could flip our innards out,

WHAT a mighty-megalopolis we'd see …

You hold inside your unseen head

A map of a thousand streets

In a dozen different towns,

You are

a trillion trivial pursuits

A hundred books, a billion dreams,

You hold ten-thousand faces in your head

No face within my face has ever seen.

For all the records in the store,

many multi--millions more, never found in print.

For all the paintings on the wall,

A planet spinning like an eye-ball bank,

With Optic tubes and vacuum brains

Ever draining and detaining the outside world.

INDEED, we are

The geriatric planet

Active inner selves … clamped shut like the Dead Sea,

Hanging on a rope

Our passions,

Dammed, by inability

and stroke.

Or …. (Even better image.)

Six billion souls

In a mammoth prison - call it the Walmart-Hilton,

each person in a private cell

all decked in shag and stereo,

wall to wall computer,

Smell-a-vison, Panavision, taste-a-meal, Terra-feel,

Streaming video, thermostats, and dials,

Memorex,

EGO-REX,

AND

A tin cup for banging on the walls.