A soul trapped in a mind with no vision
a heart with no scope

A nation lost in a funk with no laughter
a burp with no end.

In our cages like monkeys there for experiment.
In our living rooms like kings there in luxe.
Watching people make the moves, fight the fights, find the words, tackle the love, hit all the notes that we’d like to.
Waiting for the weekend to end and work to corner us again.

In the wrong somehow
Sullied it seems
By forces we’ve not adequately defined or resisted, no matter how sure we sometimes are of ourselves.

Yet

Innocent through it all by virtue of our round-eyed wonder; by virtue of how we’ll never leave the brown shag rug of the redbrick rowhouse where early morning cartoons My Little Pony Jabberjaw those years your mother treasured when she was young and her family was too; by virtue of your inability to understand the wide creek, the cement bridge undergirded by two steel I-beams, the fallen creek-crossing trees with criss-crossing thick-ridged lightbrown bark and branches sticking every which way, the slabs of rough offwhite concrete worn raw so the gray pebbles show everywhere; by virtue of bodies and minds living east of Eden while souls stay forever eating from the Tree of Knowledge, becoming more and more overawed and grateful.

These times are running through my fingers while I sit with my feet up on a sofa I would’ve never got around to buying on my own, but which I now enjoy all by lonesome. What to make of this? Clearly there is a path more worthy than freewriting bored and desperate on MLK Jr day at 6:27PM.

What to do about sexuality? Ignore it and it takes you down. Indulge in it and it takes you down. Fight it and you become a hypocrite for a little bit before it takes you down. I think you’re sick in the stomach or the head. Maybe we should carry you out of your car and lay you down on the soft dark green grass by the road.

Movies books and all that form a dialogue with a time and evolve together. Greater works speak at a fundamentaler level and so are timelesser. I’m just killing time, which is another way of saying waiting to die. Surely we can do better than this. Surely we should

AMW/BW