Planet of the Blind

Cleveland, Ohio (April)

Rain. But the quality was all wrong:

Walking Euclid Avenue I remembered the Norwegian poet:

The age of the great symphonies is over now…

Euclid; cast off buildings in all directions; ghost of Mahler

In this rain that smelled faintly of sulphur.

Borges, I walked through a keyhole just after ten am.

Then spring was green in the trees

And Mahler’s odd China—

That country of total darkness and total light

Was all my own.

Then the city’s birds were more musical

Though the rain continued gently & blue

S.K.

Miten Surullista, Kaikki

–after the Finnish of Jarkko Laine

How sad, everything…

Purple weeds

Growing beside the tracks,.

Candidates on the radio…

Beyond my window

A neighbor, a young man,

Introduces his baby girl

To the ducks.

She makes joyful sounds and claps her hands—

Human beings

Love this world so much

A spirit takes them

When they can scarcely walk.

My radio crackles & the script of ruin

Snicks through the air. El Presidente

His pants stuffed with money

Speaks of evil

In the catalyzed rhythms

Of nursery tales.

How sad to live

As the nation states

Begin to fall—

When denatured and unseen

Children are erased from the books.

Were he alive today

Even John Wayne

Would vomit in the beach grass.

America?

S.K.

What Now, Captain America?

–after the Finnish of Pentti Saarikoski

God said to Satan:

“Bow down in remembrance of me.”

Satan said: “But you are

a mathematical proposition

Or else you’re nothing

& either way—just for the sake of argument,

Abstractions are graven images.”

God punished Satan by making him the commandant of Gitmo.

Pages turned on calendars of mankind.

The wicked prospered beyond their wildest dreams.

& Satan climbed in and out of human eyes

& his footprints felt like nothing more than sand.

S.K.

More About Valhalla

He’s running for president of the afterlife

& so the dead press corps follows him. ,

Someone asks: "If elected, what will you do about Karma?"

He says that he understands Karma has always been a problem

& the goal of course is to put everybody on the same playing field, etc.,

But the government of the dead shouldn’t get involved with these entitlements,

It’s more a market based matter, skinny souls squeezing through the portals

Of rebirth, like floating lilies pushed by wind. Etc.

"But aren’t you worried, sir," asks a particuarly dead reporter,

That perceived inaction on Karma

Will negatively impact dead Viking land values?"

S.K.

Before I was a sentient being I was the sentient rain. I won’t kid you: the intelligence of water falling is the pearl of consciousness and there’s no proper wording for this. You can go ahead and talk to yourself: whisper "Hermes Trismegistus" under your breath, throw Latin around—"spiritus mundi" or "illud tempus" (your lips moving as you push the grocery cart past a display of household cleansers). You can be assured that the man behind you with the cart filled with charcoal and lighter fluid is not aware of your misfit mysticism in aisle five at Sam’s Club.

I was the sentient rain and then the sentient stone and today I will carry home the ashes of our beloved black Labrador Roscoe and I will place them beside the ashes of my guide dog Corky and the ashes of my wife Connie’s beloved dog Tasha and I will share, privately, lips moving, some shy, unadulterated heart to heart doggy gibberish with my friends who are falling forever through the pearl of consciousness impelled by the forces of love.

The spindrift syllables of rain are in the ashes and flesh. Try to get out of that. The unconscious and the carbon molecule are all the same. Try to get out of that? It can’t be done.

S.K.

The Party's Over

My father used to say that the trouble with the Republican party was its generalized contempt for the labor movement. He was not original with this but today, thinking of him and of the current flap over George W. Bush’s characterization that recent economic problems in the U.S. occurred because "Wall Street got drunk", I’m mindful of how intellectually bankrupt the G.O.P. has become. Now that there’s no labor movement to kick around, and now that the middle class has been damaged beyond recognition, now that most of the wealth has been sucked out of the republic by the top 3 per cent of the nation’s wealthiest citizens, now that this money has been transferred to Dubai or the Caymen Islands, well, it’s clear to me that the final insult to America is that the plutocrats will trivialize the entire collapse of the financial infrastructure of the middle class. I’m glad my father isn’t alive to see this. I really am. Wall Street got drunk and now it’s having a hangover. What a simpering, cynical ass you are, Mr. President!

S.K.