image by pixel2013, pixabay.com

This is not like it, the visions
of a gradeschooler
who too willingly would have
traded for a twitching butterfly
his balding, if not for the tonic,
schoolmaster:

The boy now man cannot see
the adult, his dreamer’s man
of plenty, unheeding
old shadows of proselytizers
nor the ease in blending with
divisive corridors, rooms and hallways
of edifices in whose massiveness
the boy now man sees only a boy
his haughty hallucinations of daring
into massage parlors and the dark
mysteries of a woman’s softness
is libidinous
no more than the thick
gum of a jackfruit prim
stuck out of a stick trembling
to snare taut a dragonfly as
the lad in his pants thrilled full.

His early Seventies’ Che Guevara
under whose posterized nose
huge red, black and white,
he had gone to bed, a guitar
beside him seems no more than,
to the intercourse of creed and color,
now a mere contrast, two dimensional
wall-covering sick against
the counter counterrevolutions
of nations whose vacuity of souls
is carved out of international polities.

This tyke might then have equated
the Beatles with the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse, exacting
the same precision with which
computers in their ignorant endurance
read, write or execute
his digitals and analogs.

He might even just have dreamt
becoming tough like the Sulu wars
which in the passion of novels
and the panorama of the movies
craft of clouds crowding
stood hungry like the rubble,
hesitant ghosts of a town besieged,
while under the fallen leaves, with age,
he dug worms for the mudfish.

Only, the river rippling cosmopolitan
permeates so much, the dead would bloat
softening the fibers of tension
into a swelled man’s deceptive health.

He now remembers his old man complain:

“Even our verses crawl 
limpid like litmus. 
We have ceased 
using cork pads under 
cola bottle caps. 
The substituted plastic 
yields harder to scratches 
to bare the pleasant marks of 
consumerism 
like desert drought reposed 
in languidness. 
Surely this is not like it, 
the visions.” 

© SSJ 1980

image by TheHilaryClark, pixabay.com