Bottleneck

With the exception of "Bottleneck" and a "Poem for a friend" these poems were written after the 2003 Bones in My Soul configuration. For whatever reason, they tend to be heavy on idea, and a hard chew at that. I recommend one per session.

Bottleneck

2000?

(A meditation on the difficulty of communication)


We are like that sci-fi guy speeding through galactic sky
In a ship shaped like a phone booth,
All phone booth-sized upon the hull,
But bigger than a house within.


Indeed,
We are all like grand-inflated ticks … arms
Waving tiny from our grand inner-selves
We are Macy-Day clowns the size of icebergs,
Jammed into our skin like a Jack,
And there, up in the distant sky
A bitsy-valve of a mouth like a distant dime.


They say
the tongue is a fire,
a rudder on a ship,
and Oh, …..the things that slip,
but you should hear
the things
It doesn't say.
If we could flip our innards out,
WHAT a mighty-megalopolis we'd see …


You hold inside your unseen head
A map of a thousand streets
In a dozen different towns,
You are
a trillion trivial pursuits
A hundred books, a billion dreams,
You hold ten-thousand faces in your head
No face within my face has ever seen.


For all the records in the store,
many multi--millions more, never found in print.
For all the paintings on the wall,
A planet spinning like an eye-ball bank,
With Optic tubes and vacuum brains
Ever draining and detaining the outside world.


INDEED, we are
The geriatric planet
Active inner selves … clamped shut like the Dead Sea,
Hanging on a rope
Our passions,
Dammed, by inability
and stroke.
Or …. (Even better image.)

Six billion souls
In a mammoth prison - call it the Walmart-Hilton,
each person in a private cell
all decked in shag and stereo,
wall to wall computer,
Smell-a-vison, Panavision, taste-a-meal, Terra-feel,
Streaming video, thermostats, and dials,
Memorex,
EGO-REX,
AND
A tin cup for banging on the walls.