Before it gives you swine.
Too much light is chaos;
If all we knew was heaven,
How could this be
Anything?
But there is a great creation
Overrides us like a dome.
It's a theory, like the moon,
Until talked about as real
And fractioned in our usual
Politesse.
The neighbor has a soulful sound.
It turns out that it's Mingus.
And the levels
Where these things are to be shelved
Are confused
Again.
For the tasty notes are doled out
From undisclosed locations;
We can share what we have noticed,
What has come out of machines,
We can even call it
Balinese
And strip it to its delineations
As connoisseurs of what we understand,
Now worthy of comparison
To the others who, without a body,
Have filled somehow
Our memories.
You know the names.
They're plastered everywhere,
But someone we don't know
Always has the silver pass
To get us in the dankest
Caverns.
They are always going ahead of us
In experience
What will run inevitable as current.
But how do we know these
Discoverers were not
Themselves spun?
Who's to say how the words
On everyone's lips
Were formed?
Or why we all so easily, in our video facsimiles,
Assume the same poses
Of seduction?
We follow
The voices we know,
The jokes we might tell,
The smile that we seem to understand,
For we are the children
They gesture for,
To bring them the phone
And the coppers we'd collected
And hear again their stories
Of their dark, most painful sojourns
And victories no less believable
For being earned,
And a moral always hidden
Like a magician's prestige,
The preacher's detail
That buckles the knee.
How have they obtained
Such authorities?
Have you seen them on your streets?
Could they entertain
The merchandise-sniffing
Neighbors, the drunken bloviators
And envious listeners
With that?
It's impossible to fathom how
They came to speak
For so many,
Telling ancient stories
With familiar thrust
Of jaw.
It's an alternate world
But we wear it
As our own
Out of boredom
And desire to fit in
To the suit.
You want, put out like fruit,
To be liked by them!
Was that because you found out
That they want you,
Alone among a million fans,
To like them?
What led them to this particular
Craving for adulation?
With eyes that only see
The hole you fill.
What would you do to realize
An impossible dream?
What we don't know
Would destroy them in our eyes,
For they've wasted our pity
When they would need it most,
For the things to be forgiven when
They were invisible.
