| Poems Niederngasse |
America Intense ugliness, an immense emptiness protruded unwanted in my life, ranch styles and trailer homes filled with things, deflated souls, sparse of thoughts. Mean spirits deluded in fantasies of ascendancy, Puritans of the twenty-first century garble triumphantly through rotted mouths: we are civilization! Nobler to crouch in a heathen hovel off the Baltic than to strut smiling tall on tiptoe down sanitized aisles of American temples. Bielsko-Biala 19 May 2002 Biblebeltology What ecstasies to stockpile for paradise? Old Glory, football matches, crisp western clothing, late model pickup trucks, some few practical comfortable thangs, common sensibilities, dull hardshell pretensions, ice tea, English only, steel guitars and slick gospel harmonies, time-worn prejudices. One soul suffocates another. Fierce pride and spite cultivated in this life will linger on like an odor hovering. Bielsko-Biala 29 May 2002 Peckerwood Junction USA feral lawns sport abandoned automobiles in fascinatin’ stages of disassembly monuments to a folk’s mobility rootlessness worship of technology a proud boot scootin’ kind tho’ some days indeedy dancin’s deemed a sin the salt of the real Americans’ earth is tabaky chewin’ gloree halleelooyah shoutin’ folk Bielsko-Biala 3 June 2002 Progress A minor key celebrated, the vibrant primary color recalling lost summers swept by prolific tender breezes, a subtle human gesture, exacting techniques of artistic execution, precise perspectives of thought were somehow dissipated. Modernity has withered that which once mankind prized so diligently as primeval wheat and olive. Grieving, blinded, I follow this melancholic pattern, unprepared ever to acknowledge the inevitable exceptions. New York City 29 June 2002 |
