Sunday, May 5, 2013

HISTORY MAKES FOOLS OF US ALL

The Betty Poems

when you really get down to it:
what you thought
were great: like the words
from the pens of masters
who spun profundities
like so much cotton-candy
sticking to the sugar starved
spaces in your head,
are not so
very great.
and the dynasties that have risen
claiming a hold on the imaginations
of dreamers and future conquerers
have been sullied and vanquished
like those female beauties
who struggled too much
with lipstick and high heels;
our fantasies quickly
wilted
leaving only memories
to be chewed, gnawed,
and spit out.

Andy's fifteen minutes
have been reduced
to nanoseconds--
if that. Whether it's wars
or poems or packaged stars.
Each fade or get lost
in the noise
of the moment. Even death.
Even the deaths that make you think
how could the world not stop
with acknowledgement, let alone reverence,
doesn't. And even though that death
might be sad, even tragic,
are not sad nor tragic. It is all too
dramatic, orchestrated, scripted, all
a trick to just
keep us going to keep us hoping
to keep us showing up
to punch the time-clocks
with the same sense of failure
we had yesterday
and not punch ourselves out
of the coma.
We can fool ourselves
with fame, money, even love,
but that's like putting a bandaid
over someone gut shot.

We like to think that age
makes us wise,
but our years of wisdom
lies in front of us
always. We think
we might catch it
and we do
for a second
and the wisdom
turns on us
again.
And so we sit,
sit to it,
on sofas
of discontent,
watching,
sucking our lip,
thinking of all the things
we no longer have to do:
work, love, understand.
We just have to get up
more often to piss,
strain against the sun scratched day,
think of children thinking
of monkeys,
pretend that bitterness
tastes good
in an upturned mouth,
close our eyes
when the afternoon heat
makes us lazy
and drift into
a sleep without
rest. We will conjure
up memories of all the pretty girls
in ankle socks
pink lipstick, nails pink
and chipped and perfume
store bought and sweet, so sweet
that it stands between
the fall of rose petals
wrinkled and oily.

It is not the day
nor the hour; it is neither
a plan nor a conceit; it is
simply the anthill of us
never being able to know
the life of lions.

Norman Savage
Greenwich Village, 2013

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