LA
to New York
“We do what we must, and
call it by the best names.” --
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), The Conduct of Life,
“Considerations by the Way” (1860). |
If we remove certain lives and tear down the sky
from the backdoor of a failed universe what will remain
whole? If we bruise too easily, the harvest will return
the remainder of our souls so our witness to the end can
be buried and never resurrected. I score for dreamers
to shift imagery as they turn the road backward, and let it
become subtended, invaded by the mathematics of solid
geometry, except the dimension do not conform to Euclid,
and even Einstein, whose speculations on time and space
depended on an alternate view of that solid polygon,
which is not solid, not actual, but a bare outline, a figment
of our imagination gone south, soured, turned in slush
that wets your feet to the ankles and drives you mad
with cold so insidious you believe you are frozen in Gaul
the slave of a Roman Centurion in 54 BC to set time right.
That is not the whole story.
You were seen murdering live gold fish
while washing SUV’s in LA for four dollars
an hour, so you conjure your destiny, and call it
by its best names, which amounts to a marriage of physics
and the miracles of soap powder spread against the window
of a white Lexus with a gorgeous dark haired woman
with C cups laughing so loud at your jokes, running
her mouth, you can feel the future click, and when
harvest returns this time you will be the winner,
so as the sperm connects to ovum another child drifts
down the Great Fallopian River and you have
tickets for the Knicks but you know they will lose.
How can you be aroused when the Yankee’s fail too,
and you begin to see, and put stars on maps
that New York and La are impossible planets
and not even Emerson in his Unitarian fury
can figure out what makes LA tick while Manhattan
glistens with a deep pink and orange partial eclipse
of time and space, and you must connect your life
to that old story, played again, of boy meets girl,
girl loves boy, and girl or boy walk away with
chewing gum clacking and you at home write
memories in cipher of the dreams of life worth
living again for heaven’s sake.
Let us pray, God Bless, we must make
the best of what we are given, or does
those grifts become an awful graveyard
where the living die too fast to be born
again and the dead run the sanatoriums.
Can anyone explain survival given
that deep conflict resumed in the rear view
mirror of some hot couple finding how
their bodies fit while doing it at a drive-in
but the year is 1955 and who knows when
the story will repeat to bring about another
reincarnation of the best of Lana Turner
and Clark Gable and don’t forget Myrna Loy.
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