Beautiful
as the East London slums
as depicted by the Great British Playwright:
the birds through shiny smog,
collected into symphonies somewhere
and studied by the scholars who have given all their time
to parsing inter-species harmonetics.
Life is rife with such orderings:
the five fine London dramatists, from five distinct districts,
five religions, five generations, become one -
one oeuvre like the bird song strung in chains,
a writer now greater than the ones who turned
people into characters, ideas into themes, time's patterns into plots.
It only becomes real when it's a fantasy,
for only then a voice is strong enough
to calm the ear that's plangent from the dissonance
of power devouring gems from earth's inseparable whole
because it sees them.
The waste resolves
when names are merged, when all that can be seen is
one would-be person's inexplicable gift.
O turn the individual into style,
experience into genre,
art's illegal tinctures into trope.
Anything but knowing
how slavery goes on, as cruel as ever,
with no one left to say that it is wrong.
