CORPUS KALEB
As I walked up the mountain
my eyes drifted down to the old boots on my tired dogs. Brown and worn
like the lines of my face, scuffed and scratched like the edges of my
memory.
Up the hill I continued to walk. The path was well worn from others long
since passed. When I got to the summit my eyes stretched out, over sets
of paths descending from the hill.
One went west, others
north and south, several east, around bending cacti and large rocks forever
resistant to twin spinning dust devils.
To the horizons the paths reached out, leading to where I could not think
of, coming to rest under my old ragged boots.
A large contemplating
rock sat upon the crest of the mountain, and I upon it, swept my brow
with my dusty hand, but the sweat kept dripping, sticking to my beard.
The salty taste was bitter, reminding me. I looked down from the circular
paths my eyes lighted on, going round and round, some interconnecting,
some stacked or bunched. They were not like the rest. Of all the paths
worn into the dry landscape, I could see them whole, every one. They were
never ending, never beginning. Others started at my boots or stopped there,
I did not know which. The must have been running from my step, or searching
just the same.
I looked down at my uneven, battered boots once again, and brushed the dust from the tops I noticing that the old leather had cracks, some going up, some down, even radiating out to the sole. Much like the paths leading from the mountain, worn and ragged they were like my old cracked boots.
We look at the urban bitterness
Through rusted meshed screen
Swarmed over by multitudes
Of indiscriminate mosquitoes
When my hands placed under the lintel instead of the thigh,
Pushing out the squalor forever encapsulating my station, my status.
Forming walls around transparent facades,
Making something from nothing,
Lacing things in our greedy hands
Which will never be recognizable
What has this world become?
Representative of what we want, what we think we need
Identified by objects
Burdened with fear of loss
Of things which are formed, injected, not created
Beauty is surface, like life in the now
Where real is unreal
And unreal is Simulacra
If we stare through the window long enough
We find, we see, the frames
Forming the micro making up the Meta
Who knows enough to know?
See through the veneer
Shinning like Jell-O, green gold and gone
We walk, stroll, saunter
In shoes made for the cracked pavement
Forever there only removed to entomb
An idea of being, never really born
Never really told either
Turned on like the "Machines of Loving Grace"
Automatic, self-repairing, always dependent upon flawed design
Destined to crumble at the hands
Of a concept
Has time has come full circle?
Opening chasms dreaming of things we think existed
Causing us to float
Up in a bubble of plastic and saccharine wastes
Over an edgy plane, ragged and tired
Falling into itself, to space
Have we become the point?
Defined without dimension.
Gravity giving up long ago
And Newton and Bohr play footsie with the atom
Laughing at naivety
Ours not theirs
Where has water pooled, finding no place to mud up, no fissures?
We store things in jars from fear of contamination
Loaded with benzene, purposefully packed with nitrate
Breaking bonds
Forming cancerous compounds in acidic puddles
Causing us to cry for ourselves
Our loved ones, always looking back to where we have been
Finding paths leading to other ways
My left foot finds the right’s print
New heel to old toe
Always asking why
Why is the sky not there?