the avenues reign

The bidders would like
an appraisal

from you 

of the worth of your life

in numerical value

for buying and selling and handing out medals

to give to the winners.

The most productive.

The progressive men

Who migrate linearly

from point A to point B,

and gee, oh my, that’s really something.

To possess the ability of moving things

while remaining completely still in your soul.

Remember

the loose, unfettered moments

that have left you in vague and woebegone wake?

They never fit. They never fit,

like a shoe that you forced onto you,

anyway, 

just in case it might ever fit.

This is all very sad, what I’m

saying to you.

And worthless, and cheapened still, by the second.

But the truth comes out like crazy-talk.

Like drunken, babbling brook of junk.

And we need

to delegitimize reference point,

which upholds illusion of empty hollow,

a standard to live by

of racing-track wallowing:

first-second-third

And strapped into context,

which I try so to disentangle self.

God, give me the strength

to unremember.

So I will not remember

the things that are better

and can feel that impending conditions are good.

They would be good, and they could be good,

if I just let them be,

doing justice to me.

But time has a diminutive effect on enthusiasm.

And contextures of things

are life-sentence prison-terms

pending and all-enveloping, evil-like.

I will not yield

to your make-off bake-off

and judicious stake-off allotment of claims

and settlements of freedom.

Your freedom is a succubus.

Your goodness is my bane.

Your genius is banal and hackneyed and lame.

And you will go on living, life-like,

And I will keep on

trying, life-like almost in moments

of extreme animation / re-calcitration 

which I’m hesitant of

because I’m on a crazy-course tangent

that no one will obviously understand

but it has to be 

it has to be

it has to be

it has to be

it has to be this way or that.

The clocks must all the smashed eventually.

          -clw

            12-27-04
copyright: C. Ward 2016