poem for my 59th birthday

The currency I traded in

Is bearish now, at fifty-nine

My volatility index has squandered

Its lows and highs, is in decline –

The lyric force is muted by the times,

Which lie like bricklayers build brick

To brick – as that song went, another

And another – that was the image,

If I recall, from dark gyms, at fourteen

Or so, terrified to dance slow, or quick,

With those around me on the walls;

Music, that brings us back to ourselves,

Takes us out to sea as well,

Like a drug that can murder or revive;

What language can I use to defend a form,

A rhetoric, even, that has been designed

To crush whole peoples, sign by sign?

Tanks roll on, drones scour the air like hawks,

To hurt the ones below, but only poetry kills

By sound or fine-bonded lines. To me,

What’s serene or boundless in a poem thrills,

But it advances in English, crushes like a love

That will not slow dance to urgency in grade nine.

The world was bad in sixty-six, has always been,

One supposes, ruled by the maniac fixed on deformities

Of the soul, that no plastic arts can reshape to good;

But at this peak of my presence, albeit stumbling,

I can locate, as if to blow apart, on the unsafe ground,

A collective malice in the blood, like perfume,

Except an odour of varied virulent sprays, wafting

Over borders like a gas; what can we do, who mask

Ourselves with words, to play for better futures?

I have listened to the sleepless inkwell night,

And dipping into the inexplicable infinites of minus

Light, have understood a signal from the solar winds:

It says, in no language but of mathematics, or the divine,

As if Bach had been a hole that whorled back into sight,

Bring on the great floods, make the world without form again,

So in the weird stillness before creation a differing biology

Can think itself into manifestation on an open canvass,

Rebirth of all that struggles, fights knives out, without cease;

As kindness is a primary symptom of both love and peace.

April 8, 2025

Comments

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