Blue Headroom Dynamite

Like ‘Nevermore’ sketched into water by Salvador Dali Quickly running a message up a high mast in Mali Or Michaelangelo his genius wild, cutting a lady less forlorn With a savior already finished with work and free from scorn Oddyseus’ raft might have hurried home Had it not been for the Sirens’ mercurial foam Everyman distracted, with each passing year And epoch of pain pouring tear upon tear Without discerning the rhyme or the reason Or gaining knowable time season upon season Always the lure of fruitless eternity insipid The body and mind empty: blood, bone and lipid When fools or king’s would rush in where others feared Bombs fired all round and their people were seared In jest, a plague of doubt, a feast for Decameron’s clowns In love, the firing flesh of sin falling down In war, the rage of the people aimed at shadows’ night In peace, moments too few to count, the treasure slight Wherefore the incessant loss and vainglory From what source the endless folly With each generation aimless proceeding And substantial hope forever receding How this vague sense of emptiness and sorrow And no real horizon to fill one’s soul tomorrow Each city above ground falling in on itself A cascading destruction from the continental shelf [river] All built upon empty dreams, from false stories past Or emptied like a dream, when the brain wakes fast Awake to the shuddering quake of earth below Or perhaps Earth itself, blowing up in a glow Just like Rome to fall away at the end of time to pass the cup, to self-destruct on the vine From Aeneas came the Trojan horde Yet he ate his tables instead of fall on his sword While some chanced Paris instead Without casting runes or checking their head To hence or from where it could not matter On the fat of the lamb each gentile growing fatter Over the centuries, the meaning of things or remorse Grew dim and stolid, owning a garden or grooming a horse With all of the sparkling treasure and treats so kind None could fathom true nature’s curse, or pay it any mind