I’m tired of not being a great blue whale.
I’m sick of frills and gossamer ostinatos.
I want to feed a Happy Meal to a cheetah.
I’m tired of not being Nicanor Parra.
I want to say, basically, fuck you to poetry
with all its outlandish maunderings.
Magic numbers piss me off,
I’m bored by rubrics and party lines,
the bloody giblets of nostalgia disgust me.
The past is a sadly inadequate word
for what we’ve been through,
earthly existence, this life, right here.
Nature ruled the planet long before our entrance
yet surely its reign was nothing more
than a pulsating machine-works of appetite,
ultra-vivid but purely mechanical,
a rococo cuckoo clock
trivialized by its own clownish reality,
its too literal presence in the moment.
Is the air in which they disport
truly so wonderful, vainglorious swallows
making a spectacle of themselves
as if to prove their familiarity with a drama
in which we resemble minor characters
bumbling onstage in the final act?
Of course we admire the birds and trees
but their diffidence insults our dignity
and when, inevitably, we lash out in anger,
nature has none but herself to blame,
for we, too, bear the mark of her flawed manufacture
from our first, gasping, egg-damp cries.
To be human is to be scissor-cut
in bold strokes from imperfectly pressed paper,
our brains, like huge unblooming peonies,
tug our bodies inexorably earthward,
while language resembles a clutch of party balloons
intended to lift us to salvation
but there is so much that cannot be captured
in pink latex and self-reflective Mylar—
snow falling on the temple gardens of Kyoto,
the heroic loneliness of cemetery flags,
even our drive along the Palisades Parkway
on a summer day so long ago.
The past—what an awful word
for something we can never get beyond,
no matter how restlessly we travel.
The Palisades Parkway comes to an end
in Rockland County, New York,
just beyond the abandoned hamlet of Doodletown.
All good things must come to an end.
But not all good things end in Doodletown, New York.