Oh, we have lost our involvement!

Don't you deny either that our workings in whirlwinds
are ways along a torn road where our crumblings
scatter like new dust from urns. I have seen your
labor devoid of pleasure, and know the tools you
cherish are not your own.

A speed of cars with human hearts
could drown the blood on the streets,
and a halt of prison stuffed with men who move
could not rot the crimes a driver keeps
behind his oil light, beneath his hood.

What motion seems picture-sane
in this cobbled crippled heap?
A flash of a knife, the arc of a gun,
a violent show-down on a motionless
screen?

Or perhaps
a honied lamb with golden wool and curls
who cherishes the grass it eats, the
flock it meets, and the razor edge
that makes it butcher's meat?

Oh, we have lost our involvement!

The truth we mourn lies in sandy dunes,
shifting with flourishes of acrid wind.
But its not the ripples, the color of land,
nor even an old camel tooth.
Its not the desert, nor the sun, which
meet each other like two simple hands.
Its not the moon set in the black above,
its not the oasis, though like a jewel,
seems set by love. Its not the dew
of one-time rain, its not the howling
old refrains, its the simple and speckled
grains that with no rhyme nor reason
continue to remain.

Oh we have lost our involvement!

Give me Lorca's green guitar
on which to sprinkle our sand,
give me Laura's red violin
on which to notice our hands.
Give me Robert's yellow clarinet
on which to mark our land.
Give me Melissa's blue flute
on which to play our stand.
Give us instruments painted red white or blue
give us a piano the color of the moon,
give us a lute like a comet or two,
for you have taken
what little music we have made with our hands.

simple sky

Allow us simple unscientific sky.

Who wants to live beneath information,
To lay in fields among nipping night
And hear the descriptions of chemical nomenclatures
Echoing within starlight the statistic’s rate
Of miles per second, or to feel in breath
The patterns of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide
Predicted by measured descriptions counting
Off new numbers on each numbered day?

Our lives are numbered enough
For us to not breathe blue.
The distance between allotments and bills
Are astronomical enough in cycles
For us not to know the black holes
Of the human mind. Tell us
Instead that gravity is love,
That we are held to the earth
As though by a lover
Until we slip away into her embrace
To be wed in earth forever
With the sky arched as a forest bough
Blooming with the flowers of silk clouds
That mean only rain or thunder,
That mean nothing molested by a number,
That mean ‘always’ and ‘forever’
In sky and light, in night,
In sunset leaving it’s pink embers.

Sick of the yellow moon,
Its firefly light ignored by drunkards.
Mention the moon and you become a fool.

I am a fool, constantly and ever stupid,
Attempting at the wonder of a mere moon
Or the sublimity of quiet clouds as
They pass between astronomical distances
With only the help of a little wind
On a cold night. You were my little
Wind, and I the fool, large and ugly
As the everyday.

And now our small musics.
Passing in store aisles or a little
Comment at a restaurant, you who
I recognize in all women remain
Too kind. This jazz in the hospital,
The flowers at the prison, your
Little lips. How your beauty
Thinks of everything but ‘beauty,”
How your lips cautioned mine
Against hate.

Too traveled now, the two of us,
To know the old phone numbers.
Too traveled now, the world among us,
To ring like bells for the limit of our old youth.

Sometimes I am in some times like times some
razor clock hand slit like dying farm birds
and other times I could but speak
of the cloud's shadow speech concerning
other times.

It is too late for pretext,
you leave your reading clothes
where they're donated to the war.
The great weak widows frail in house
and desperate in home will rise
to collect the garments of your luxury
just as the policemen came
and beat your grandmother with a hose.
Your context is a foot bloodying
your magazine rack, your meaning
just lost in tragic circumspect traveling
to the safe parts of the world
known as insane asylums by the dangerous.

Sometimes, other times.

In other times, sometimes
swept female hair licking wind with perfume
and embrace's velvet voice singing nonsense
at his and her's melodic choice,
their audience not made from eyes
but others who touched touch in a kiss's
red woman whirl, in the wind's strutting
through free fall hearts pulling on love's
parachute twirl,
above everything
though with everything above,
a feeling like that.

Do not make me compare the contrast
this time, other times it has cried my
tears. Sky, bird, sky, plane. Burning
houses with flaming wind and rain.

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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