AN EPILOGUE OF SORTS (reprise)

The quick brown fox of intuition
jumps over the lazy dog of intellect.
In the cavern, shadows gather round the stew
or huddle in crannies (but only on weekends)
to hear Platonic oratorios rendered inoffensively
by descendants of Aristotle and his Orchestra of
Broken Winds.

The flatulent frog of financial success
hops over the fraudulent toad of commercial excess,
Leaving a definite whiff of death and decay.
The dead red bleeds through a yellow flag
into the deep blue of oceanic woe.
It’s only a nightmare of carnival ponyrides
driven by the slave power of wild horses
captured in their sleep.

I wake up to the green tones of birds and squirrels
trying to hold back the afternoon.
Morning is too short and the nights are too long.
With rings under their eyes and through their flaming
nostrils, froth on their lips and electrode scars
on their skulls, the foreign legionnaires of the insane
shriek through the streets:
“UNPLUG THE JUGGERNAUT!”
But their thin voices are drowned by the traffic.

I watch from the tower safe behind glass
and the sight of a crawling humanity turns my reality
into a desperately dull movie with only one redeeming
feature: there are no credits
and all the blame goes to no one
except us.

Yes, US. Because we are too busy with our hands
to bother thinking what kind of world we are making
with our minds.

So we leave it all to the Experts.
Whose minds are not their own anyway,
since nobody gets to be an expert who won’t surrender
his soul to Mammon & Moloch. And an entire pantheon of
pathetically false gods, worshiped neither by animal
nor vegetable nor mineral –
only by a benighted humanity half-awake to itself,
half-asleep in pajamas of scientific concupiscence,
abusing itself in fear and guilt,
never knowing ecstasy.


[Written in 1976. First posted 16 January 2007]

MORE POEMS IN MOTH BALLS (PUBLISHED 1994)