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Sometimes I am candled and lit by sunlight streaming straight through cool clean sea wind, setting my wonder aflame with the mellow joy often found in a glass of wine, ablaze even in the outdoors as I trace sparse and ornamental greens upon the branches of what counts as city nature. Call me a kid, but I could inspect the topography of garden soil for an hour even as the loam pulsates with worms, call me an idiot, but I could place my face into the folds of a rose blossom for minutes to let its perfume dissipate car exhaust about the corners of my couch-fabric coat. And in these small moments I am alive and unafraid, ready to donate money to the homeless after marching in a Labor Day parade. But then I get the feeling that something isn't real beneath all that joy, as though an adult walked by and told me to take a shower. I am fortunate for the wonder even when it passes by as quickly as it swelled from a secret way kept under all these clothes and skin.

For those of you who are free from the establishment of terror that bureaucratizes thoughts, I envy you. Such an existence almost seems like innocence and naivete when agents of suffering are gaining new footholds on the world. But also, I am terrorized by conventions, harrowed by the routine matters involved in micro-economics, angst-ridden after too many failed dealings with institutions. School couldn't help me graduate, mental hospitals couldn't cure me, and life only sends its best regards in the accomplishments of others. Larger and less self-centered is the suffering worldwide; famines, corruption, droughts, disease, wars, and death which we ignore in order to hum happily along in tune with our fellow happy hummers.

But we have lost our wonder, our child-like appraisal, despite retaining our ignorance. We can lose our ignorance and improve our wonder, it is possible, just difficult.

I Am Waiting

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
Of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the second coming
And I am waiting
For a religious revival
To sweep thru the state of Arizona
And I am waiting
For the grapes of wrath to stored
And I am waiting
For them to prove
That God is really American
And I am waiting
To see God on television
Piped into church altars
If they can find
The right channel
To tune it in on
And I am waiting
for the last supper to be served again
and a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the great divide to be crossed
and I anxiously waiting
For the secret of eternal life to be discovered
By an obscure practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and TV rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am waiting for retribution
for what America did to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for the American Boy
to take off Beauty's clothes
and get on top of her
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder


I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeting lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

If you could tell me the work of worlds
I would not listen unless
your words involved the play of hearts
upon love's orbit which brings the seasons
and hardens thin blood to warm frost.

The science of locks repels me
from a supple clever key,
the physics of hatred demands
movements that have nothing to do
with the style that you sing.

And in the last world that magnified
my broken ankle from past and future
to agonizing present, we fought for
grander things than the safety of our
knees.

The edges of a scientist's dream
must be rational indeed
to account for the old trunks
we carry with us while waking
and while asleep. God forgot
to give us the combination
on this world where beauty
locks itself inside the blossoms
of a billowing cherry tree, he
forgot to make us study love
instead of the Earth's engine
while ignoring spiritless disease

I saw the yard wide open filled with bleached tree trunks
emptier than bones. The dead garden struck me like
my own confessions set to the difficulties of songs
fashioned by small birds and at the driveway my
mind began cracking open like the pavement's
silent verse, filled with a concrete degradation
of soil's softness spread about the earth.

As for the hospital's intervention, the nurses
really hung their words at the gallows where
frail meanings break their necks before
rebellion saw its birth. The rooms missed
artistic expression and smelled cold like
a dead bird taken from the freezer before
cooking in the hearth.

Patched up effortlessly by some pills and cognac,
then discarded to the Earth.

Made difficult by old musics cliched conclusions
and the perfect circles drawn vicious by coins
leaning against art's worth. Made easy by
idiot watches counting numbers lost even
when you come in first place.

I saw the formula for oceans in the tired
waves sweeping shorelines around shipwrecks
I heard the gulls open up like conversation
as the ravens warned of storms and the
spirits of dead captains lined up to navigate
hell for the chance of brandy beyond the
hurricane horizon.

It was Earth;
I could feel it,
it was home and not on drugs,
it didn't drink
but ate only mangoes
and flowers on a path
too difficult for solitude to traverse
with its heavy pack. But here,
the sea wind conceals the swirls
of gasoline, the ocean burgeons
before the waste of ships and
the streets burn with so much
false light that you no longer
want to keep your eyes open to belief.

The birds I sent you in those letters,
did they sound like the lines I erased?
The winds I gathered for envelopes,
did they sound like fate collecting feathers
strewn where oceans end in desert?

We will eat boysenberries plump on dying vines in our free time
and listen to harmonicas beneath freeway overpasses hum
like wind chime rhymes. We will graffiti property thefts and
mural slave halls in fresco as the engines of monolithic design
shear our breath into labored pain, as the factory smokestacks
choke us with their ashen refrain, as the missiles screech like eagles
inside this cage of blue. We will sell our speech for new
rose petals, we will drink the river meshed by pollution's
fetters, and we will reach a tower where the sun tells the
hour if only to celebrate heaven while we painfully age.

We will be excused from lectures once we have had too much
to think. We will send in papers scrawled with hieroglyphic
letters and call professors late at night to inform them that
ideology too wears argyle sweaters and speaks in structured
diagrams of chalk safe from the weather unfurled like
a flood behind our kitchen door. At night we will read
the charts of the stars and ask to be lead through the
waters rising above parked cars into a home softly free
and floating like our hearts.

We will forget how to speak as the television informs
us of a thrilling new disease, when the radio names war
by failing to list any recent casualties, when the papers
bleed in blackened ink we're still able to read like
the price of gasoline versus the cost of our destructive
machine that we decided to lease from an institution
charging us hidden fees, well you know in the end
you just do it to make amends and not to think about
permutations that could have been.

your average charity

Three courtesy pennies dulled as beaten tin on the counter
nestled in a Joe Camel ashtray.

Water fountains burnished with tan stains and aluminum scratches,
faded as though by nuclear war.

History books dog-eared and thicker than halibut, page edges
swathed by permanent marker. Book plate reads: "This Book
Belongs To Your Momma Is Gay," the crowning achievement
of famous activities as performed and related by white European
mongrel males.

A fingernail sized piece of gouda at the supermarket,
free parking on holidays, a sun that bathes us in a warm
watercolor wash of frescoed daylight.

Museums with donations. An ocean of air sliding
through the narrow hallway of earth and ozone.

Helloes, pretty dresses on strangers, and a free credit report
once a year. Some time upon the weekend and a checking
account if you are a student.

Goodbyes. Disease. Dreams of fresh mangoes pregnant
beneath a banyan tree. Scattered stale cranberry muffins
beneath an unlocked dumster's lid. A shoe on the highway.
Eyes, ears, nose, lung, and limb. Swirling pale arms in fluid
arcs beneath the ocean's skin. Kissing. The soft fire
glowing in euphoria when you take a chance and win.