Dialogue
To whom do I speak?
If the tradesmen listen
what will they hear: babble, bubbles of noise,
the ill-measured clamor of the industrial drum-beat,
cacophonies of strange language
the bustle and build of a nation’s towers. I get lost in their dictionaries.
Whose fault they are voluminous?
On the other hand
I am similarly rejected
by the intellectual formalists.
And it is not just because I neglect
to use capitals.
Form is a god I do not can not will not worship. But order has a quietness about it.
Is it not the glue of civility?
I live in a parallel world, it seems,
searching amongst helter-skelter polyglot mobs.
It is like asking directions of the monster
while circuiting the labyrinth,
or in a city like Fez, its narrow tortured streets, as medieval
and twisted as if just cut down from the cross. So who then’s to be listener? Is he the one with
a forked tail; or does he have a head like a heifer?
These days I am an outcast liberal
in a city of “democrats” where answers are believed
to always lie
in the will of the majority. Um… Just define your meaning.
There is no escape from complicity.
Thus it does not matter; whichever way I turn
they look at me strangely, wrinkle brows in askance,
as if this curiosity were some genetic mishmosh,
a will of the wisp, a chimeric potpourri,
which rejecting the straight-forward, the simplicities,
has an obviously pathological need
to examine, and express,
every form of complexity. Schmuck! Who is this about? Really!
Are there not others to whom an
emotional turmoil is a gesture is a
reason for empathy? Or is all this but a futile, a struggling, hapless, hopeless
species of one to whom I am speaking?