In the end, when payment was due,
the piper got his in gold-
an array of jewels that sparkled
like fairy-dust on the evening horizon.
I was there, a fair-haired child
with wide curious eyes, milking the scene
for great insights that only fade into vague
recollections of something, somewhere I had once seen.
Life, thereafter, was a proletarian brown fall
that fell to snooze button remedies
of flashing panic – waking when I should’ve,
could’ve, would’ve been awake some time before.
But some time before, I was lost,
though not in the way I am now,
the way that says in crazy dreams
things aren’t what they seem.
A listless punch-clock of blurred reality;
an electro-hum thunder glow that resonates
from below and within but then has nowhere
to go until it is too late:
Late as a measure of guilt,
a practice of imposition of one’s will
over another until victory prevails
as timeliness and order and then…
Businesses can be established,
militia formed, interest sparked, peaked & maintained-
a steady drum rhythm that makes man
stand upright a little more easy.
Time becomes the measure of the man
and not his soul – the practical, tried and true,
red, white and blue estuarial estate
of everything the pink man says is great.
And that’s great and all, but when the wall
comes down, whether at once or brick by brick,
the nature of the man is the one that will stick
in the innermost confines of the observing mind.
What I’ve observed is that when a ravage howl
cries in the night, it is the civilized man
that cries first in fright, is first in flight
and first to cry Heaven’s mercy at blight.
I’ve been to Point Pleasant in the early
dawn, when the stench of Death was Hell’s yawn,
and sat down by the riverside where it’s best
to decide from whence the current comes-
the soiled stains of an undergarment numbed
and warm, somber in the sun, while flies
play catch the flesh marmalade
and go away disease-ridden and free.
- an excerpt of “Life After the Storm by Mike Dinglersee more at http://nolarising.blogspot.com
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