Compete for a view: I raise your palms and
Call your pencil pines, and light an eternal
Torch at night because I can! Their cars run
On envy not on love, and from the vast
Desolate porticos, black windows hold
Savage children who can't tie their own shoes
And moan all day long.
Something stays here
That doesn't distribute downstream,
Some vacancy of heroism
In the stone figurines, some terror
Of importance on the tennis courts
Where no one can play, some inescapable
Irony, in this homage to uselessness,
Created from the dead end of the useful,
Use,
That thing offered for their approval,
Those so destitute they can only slake
An inconceivable pain by winning every game,
An abstract construction, unlike the lives
That turn with their wheel, too painful for them
To bear, except as the place they never
Want to enter: human in the abstract,
When there are real cards and real dice
And secret techniques for cheating the unfeeling
Vaults.
Yet the jungle feels nothing
When the tiger strikes. For the one you know,
That everyone knows, isn't known, there is too
Much shame. Thus the face could be anyone,
Anyone could stake the claim.
But it's not
For everyone, to reduce the light of life
To a thumb and a button, for the brave ones
Know that value is a void, what falls to them
A nullity to savor.
