Some Anecdotes Without Evidence

For Patrick Kurp

Everybody blogs, and every writer writes it every day,
Everybody has so much of the little they have to say.
It goes around in circles, like the colors of our cars,
The earthly panorama always stops at who we are,
And sometimes at George Hamilton, or heroin, if chance
Will favor us the slot we always play, spun like a trance,
The pulse of all we never really needed just to know.
We cannot live our own, and cannot really do as we are shown,
So the models are all broken: Lindsay Lohan, such starved
To live as children without childhood, addict superstars
(Or are they superstar addicts?), who dump their guilt on politics
And pay good people to take care of the waifs they have picked.
The circle goes around this, marvelous souls find such joy
In it, in millionaire boys with deadly toys from angry streets
Who get their trap stars back, summon orgies in their sheets
Most every night; they play a children's game and we all watch.
I know it's so much different than that, that it's much too much
The truth, but here we are:
We've lost our government, our sense of ethics, our valor,
(It's been gone at least since Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire),
So we leave great thoughts to specialists, to "talk among themselves,"
And act like any businessman, say it doesn't pay to delve,
For there is no point in saving Alexandria's library,
There is no need to burn it down, we gave the Popes our key,
To be young again, to be free to surf pornography,

To dream away our lives inside the maze that James revolved
And Chekov named, and eyes inside the prize of time resolved
To give to us, without malice or shame, because they still love us
And we still love them, who toiled in words as others toiled in stone,
Who shaped their world because they loved it, not to linger on.

The roads to the suburban hills are always dark and narrow,
Everything is lost on the voyage back and forth, at stair toe,
Except the books, with inner light for those who dare, to read.
There's someone in the would-be towers, who feels that piquant need
To noodle with a would-be feather, by would-be candle,
To conjure like a wizard all the books that he can handle,
To show that all the finest thoughts connect us every day
To the way we bake our bread, and go out picking blueberry,
And a thousand other things that TV, and the movies
Dull with lost, heroic faces and with synthesizer sneezes,
And daily news that's now one diabolical diversion,
The constant chatter of the twittering of one's own version
Of the half-truth in the half-light.

Your words are like a surgeon's,
Surrounding without touching the disease. It's no virgin,
This flesh, but it can feel a new birth coming every morning,
And words are always tumbling through the skies -- who has the time
To catch them? Yet you can find them in the vast, akashic vaults.
But that's not what you're after, I don't think.
There is that fault
Of manly, virile ego that plagues you, as you contemplate
The holocaust while drinking poplar trees.
Amazed, we gape
At your humility, the way you shower the words without blame
(But that's only because we are all narcissistic these days,
Panting for the thought police to find us, glory as our due,
Mere 'attaboys won't do, surrendered to our false and fallen selves).

The writer -- has no duties -- but to put down on the page
The truth to be forgiven, the beauty left to age.