The clock that splits in sirens through my sleep
Is not less kind to you, and not less fierce
I stuff a finger in the eye of time
To blind for us a morning time of peace,
And we are born once more into the sun
That darkens with a memory’s monsoon.
I watch your rising body edged with light
And think again what silences we build
On the entire momentum of our skins
That break like shrapnel on the furious bolt
Where nights that store and fuse our heat’s illusion
That we are made of fire, become like one.
To shatter as we shatter at a sound
And plan to smile on breakfast eggs and hunt
Headline and paragraph across our toast,
Hoping somewhere to find the true account
That guarantees the roof will stand, walls
Not blow apart, and reason keep our meanwhiles
Now in my thirtieth year, statistically
Midway down my insurable intent
I waken like a stranger to my life
Thinking my life is full of boys that went
Like tinsel into wind and blew like flame
Or spat themselves on rock in bitter phlegm.
Learning that there is everywhere enough
Of metal, powder, fire, and gas
To split the world apart like a glass gadget,
While some dream God and universe,
Some of stock market, some of maiden head,
And all the rest are bleeding for their bread.
Technologies that heat our morning baths
Measure our toast and ring when circuits close,
Delay us on a street of plastic tiles
Until the ammunitions of a fosse
Grow bold in chains of atoms and begin
The bright concluding gasp of nitrogen.
We have lost nothing while yet we wake desiring
And yet our loss is deeper than desire,
Knowing it is worse to hunger without meat
Than to be famished in the spirit’s fire,
And we are starved by all the lean world’s famine
After its glut of man-flesh and machine.
Now at this ticking time of metal clocks
When all my days are ringing in my ears,
The falling minutes drench me like a rain
Whose thunder is my own unfinished fears
That all the deaths we die were tried before,
And reason must forever lose its war.
To speak the whole mind out is elegy.
What nothing born of newsprint knows,
Nor any radio mentions between commercials,
Is how the unreligious shadow grows
A taste like grass roots deadening the tongue
That waved like tree-tops, those minutes we were young.
And still the wish is theological:
Though saints are out of office and heaven not listed,
Our hungry cells, whose motive is groceries,
Are speculative fools and have invested
In heavens of their own. They play on margin
And fail at last, but for a while they win.
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