What Lies Below
Like oil, boiling out
From puddles beneath the earth,
Like a volcano, flaring up,
Like a cry of exaltation at being free
From vast, but constricting caverns that lie below.
We walk on this; we live on this,
The thin crust we think as solid ground,
While deep within,
A God angered by the depredations we have spawned,
Sends tremors as a warning to our race,
A Popocatepetl blowing the top off a farmer’s field,
A demonstration to this weasel world
That it, not us, is in charge.
It is all the same; skin deep is what we see:
Venous blotches that ramble through interstices,
Like abstract portraits of complex molecular forms
Across my thighs, marks that surreptitiously expand
With each passing year, as indicative
Of that process we concede is Age,
As hearing loss and loss of mind,
A whole potpourri of degenerative signs.
A press, a plug, and for one alleged heuristic moment it is gone,
As though these indications of disease
Were ought but fantasies of weakened will.
There is this dream.
Keep pressing, and the vibrant
Freedom of thoughtless expression
Of untrammeled youth will reappear