Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Look You

Walburga Retreat 2018

Look you, from the inside of lesser happenings, she saw an abyss to be crossed, a triumphant return, long journeys unending in their particular homogeneity, cascading complexities of human love and hate, lost souls and worlds, new beginnings with exciting potential, the death of the mother much later than the father, dreaded in her undoing, beastly and not brave, the father as courageous as the mother cowardly. The spending of every penny. 

Beggar boys with cups in hand dancing a jig on the edge of reality. A world groveling from screwed boxes of marketability; the end of everything, the beginning of something. Out of the grime of ghetto chaos, a heart stayed beating. The riffraff almost undid her; the west waning with not much to replace it, ill-gotten culture tucked under the arm with the wanting, the wanting, the wanting; burning with desire, squandering expectations of fleeting guilt; an idea of one’s own, bypassing death as legions of the privileged dropped before her, not unsung but hardly living up to potential, hyenas haggling over the stolen bits, the unwashed parts, the mistakes, the unknowing, the intoxicated babblings of a frightened girl in search of protection and identity, hard shelled but vulnerable. 

Not thinking they were exclusive, difficult, lengthy in development through exterior harbingers of regret and longing, expulsion and sacrifice required, lost at sea for so long, belching the unspeakable, negotiating the unquenchable; hearing swan songs, death dives, suicides and ODs, forgotten boys and girls at midtown gay bars, spilling over the edge of ingratitude and indifference. Family with bribes to disappear, puffed up and uncaring, slithering into vaudeville, vulgarity surfacing freely; prayers at hand, division between step and stone.

Marble-eyed critics encased in glass structures – a lack of charity able to shrivel the heart; all about need, an arena of unexamined lives nipping like dogs at the heel, the bolstering of saviors, the help of the unasked with tidings of hope. In uncharted oceans where plans were devised in secret to know something, to do something, to be something, as the boot crushed her hand, making a mark before the show was over despite the relentless squandering of spirit, she stood on the ocean shore seeing how much bigger the world is than the tiny grumblings of the discontented, the fortunate, the bolter of doors where rocks remain unturned and the small voice of past grievances gnaw at her shallow grave where she refused to step before all that must be said is uttered, all ideas displayed; the parts mended, the esteem raised, the demons struck out with silver crosses and a good dose of healthy thinking, her eyesight failing but the determination intact, swirling in a foreign land with thin pockets and bold eyes, she walks to the precipice to shout down ghosts, grifters, gatekeepers and self-righteous asides to move past what is allowed to what is praised since force of character and a poetic sensibility gets attention despite hesitation, and if credentials won’t serve, indomitable potential can replace.