The Events Themselves

      Happily at home amidst a blizzardy haphazard of papers
              dawn steeps the window with visionary promise
                for the entire apartment complex.
         I am barren as you are barren, in a world replete with objects
5             indifferent to our crux; I am broken and unwise
                as you yourself are broken, and both unclear
                  and nobody objects.
         Its always a trifle embarrassing to be caught in the act, to be alive
              isn't it?  Coping with jaundice and child-proof tops, waking
10              out of the same problematical nightmare at five
                  as if sleep were the body's occasion for jeering
         at the brain, which imposes its ordinary articulate order
              fetishistically every day on the bombardment of senses
                selling us fictions while telling it all, reporting odors
15                and heartthrobs with equal indifference.
         God bless the gods, apathetic executives of the irrational
              who are powerless without our laughable bodies
                to cast even a third-rate thrill-
                  er, and make of our unable lives
20                   their inarticulate movies.
         Discursive stanzas look like they're hurrying
              to the nowhere-somewhere of a formal fountain's
                repetitive static whiteness.
                  What is left to say, is there anything?
25       Let love be the last letter of the penultimate law
              righting us rigidly as a strapping father full of laughter
                when like every incertain curious infant thither
                  we totter and yaw.
        And yet, with all of that said (so much) and (conceivably)
30           registered in heart and in head by habit
               each day is only a day at play....
        A lesson in how dowdy light becomes slowly a whole room
             and the grateful green leather chair emerged
               awaits patiently by the window its daily burden
35                like a remembered word
        its definition.  Its in this way that we have died already
             died and come to this life, two civil persons
               talking together sanely, quietly, long-windedly
                  as an aqueduct hums.
40      The world is full of sane sunlight and responsible landscapes
             not too impossible for believable humans to accomplish
               their unremarkable heights or average depths
                  and whose prayers resemble steps.
        But first a brief sleep, first order of business, then work (not too late)
45           may commence: every man must darkly his own
               unconscious Olympus propitiate
        as when a mountain, unexpectedly on the horizon alone
             rediscovers, without notice or noise
               its monumental poise.

 

From the collection "The Sword Inside"

Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]

More information available on gregglory.com.