Across the Broken Boundaries

Across the broken boundaries My mother spoke to me with her eyes And I understood The mood upon my father's face The song so irrelevant To the situation's required comment But it was good for me To know What each shift and contour of body meant This was less punishing to the skin Than too late recognition of arguments Words meant th end of negotiations I liked to disengage Into books ... where fairytales or science Was the same kind of fantasy to me I felt no pain In virtual curiosity or ... fulfillment Though I was scarred by words Meant to rebuke me I was stronger For my knowledge of the oral tradition. So why do I read the bits and bytes Of new landscapes From silent cinemascope To pixel pictures In pregnant telephones Delirious with apprehensions? Are all these electrons around me Battering against the flesh imperceptibly Free radicals of thought Swingeing the brain The new spirituality, A community replacing the baobab tree Of village reason? I negotiate nothing with air Except my increasing powerlessness And the meaninglessness of fear. From touch tone Camera to screen The new domination of belief Is not so superficial As academics now scope in grief Mother's eyes had more life than automatons More compassion than read only memory I correlate all violence In the tsunami of expectation Less with phases of the moon And more with chips Disintegrating sand dunes in winds Of electronic conversation I am a satellite of no theory But what I discern And the faith my mother taught me In this across the broken boundaries Still only a marginal cathedral I yearn