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Tag: change

While Reading of Ginsberg’s Life

To wake
while reading William Blake
to taste of life in dreamlike doses
flexing the sinews of the mind
in the fight against some status quo
that lumbers, like a Clydesdale pair
to drag a dying culture’s broken-wheeled cart
along the muddy ruts
of road built to achieve a purpose
travel to the same crowded cities
filled with lives teeming with uncertainty
holding fast to corroded dreams
that emphasize our lack of clarity

the underlying pinions of capitalism
wasted on the ill-at-ease, the wayward pilgrims
seeking truth despite the cost
their families shamed and raked with muck
in vain attempts to build illusions
that all’s right with the world

there is a need for change, for growth.

26 APR 2004

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Changing the World

If I say I want to change the world

without asking first its permission
without asking the right questions
without first accepting my limitations
without wondering about my own role
without looking beyond my own hard science
without recognizing the status quo
without battling my own personal demons
without watching first, and listening
without staking my reputation
without risking seeming foolish
without figuring out what I am willing to die for
without doubting my own abilities
without seeing the possibility of loss
without shaking the roots of my faith
without wanting to be amused
without having second thoughts
without giving up what this world gives me
without reaching beyond my grasp
without rejecting some kind of immortality
without changing myself

what kind of revolutionary am I?

Only in a world that needs changing so desperately,
it clings to any prop, regardless of whether or not that prop may float
where those who populate that world
do not ask those questions of themselves,
without my prompting,
would such a revolutionary be followed.
I would not follow them, myself.

In that kind of world, there is no revolution,
only the illusion of rebellion,
a paper tiger tossed by an apathetic hand
into the glowing embers
of the same old song and dance.

How many revolutionaries does it take to change a light bulb?
One, if the light bulb wants to be changed.

22 AUG 2003

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In Boston

In Boston, where I cut my teeth
on the raw meat of delusion,
and watched myself in disbelief
live penniless out on the street,
my college days found conclusion.

There on the green line, Brookline bound,
I took a job dispensing meat,
catching the train just above-ground
where the fare was free, and found
my way back home on snowy streets.

I lived on brown rice and boiled beans
(having not the funds to acquire
the steaks I hawked) and sorted greens;
and turned my hard earned meager means
over to an ex-friend and liar.

There were many ex-friends those days,
all concerned that I might impose,
asking a spot to store my clothes
watching the clock during my stays;
there were better guests, I suppose.

Not like the early summer time,
when I first moved into Beantown
and thought to turn my life around —
in Berklee’s halls to find sublime
music, and perhaps write it down.

But who you are will seek you out
despite your best efforts to change,
and every granule of self-doubt
you own it will bring out, and flaut,
making your thoughts crazy and strange.

And then all you can do is leave
behind those tattered dreams, that place,
knowing yourself no more deceived.
Then, in memories later retrieved
there is no point in saving face.

15 AUG 2003

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Another World

You never told me that you’d tried to change;
all of this time I just thought that you were strange.
You never said those magic words
that turned our hearts from rocks to birds.

You never tried to understand:
all I wanted was the promised land;
you never saw those tears I cried
when the phonograph broke down and died.

Ah, you’re living in another world
Ah, is it easy to laugh at me, girl?
Have you found the things that make it all worthwhile?
Have you touched the sky, or seen an angel smile?
Is it better to have substance, or have style?

You never reached inside and felt around
while you were floating high above me on the ground;
you never stopped to cut the strings
that tied me to your rhinestone wings.

You never promised me the stars,
but drove me, often, all around, in fancy cars,
to visit lost and lonely souls
who lived in broken, plastic bowls.

You’ve lived your life in another world
Is that anything to be proud of?
Is it easy to imagine that you’re anywhere
When the circus of your life comes around?

You told me that you never learned to dance;
what is anything worth if you don’t take a chance?
If you never learn to look around,
how can anything that’s lost be found?

1986

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On the Wasteland

So the old world is gone, let a new one replace it!

The world is already dead; that figment
of existence that you knew in the past,
the places well-remembered, those fond scenes
where the history of an ancient folk

(all the hungry babies and curious
children, rebellious teens and then
struggling examples of the working class,
disillusioned prophets and vain playboys,
cross-makers, judges and even martyrs
to the illusions of eternity
constructed and destroyed in an eye’s blink –
in short, those former faded selves of yours
that hide, like skeletons in your closet)

built its quartz sand tableau on the seashore,
where the omnipresent ocean of time
could roughly lick at its crumbling edges
like a ravenous kitten at its cream.

Let the future begin, all you must do is face it!

What is there to remember of the world
that does not, in an instant’s too brief span
fizzle into so much escaping gas
and mingle with the eternal present

(and if held back too long, builds up pressure
in the decanting glass of your reason,
becoming a most volatile mixture
susceptible, if only shaken by mistake,
to expand with a great destructive force
and end both the experiment and the
brief tenure of the experimenter)?

For each moment is past in the second you waste it.

The world is already dead; it has changed
its morphology and become a new
thing, its outline no longer familiar
to those legion of erudite scholars

who seek in vain to catalog its form
and function, to quantify its effects
by narrowing down to a single thing
its primary cause (and to then posit,

through some process of elimination,
a purpose for existence that can be
pounded into pabulum for the masses,
without a consensus of the entire
organism on the truth of that goal).

And yesterday’s wine is dissolved, once you taste it

What is it about our sad illusions,
of our past, that we do not carry as
part of the present self? We do not need
to imprison the world in our own cage,

forcing it to pace the same length and width,
keeping both it and ourselves from moving
beyond these walls, beyond the small, frail life
we imagine is defined so clearly

(but in truth is so much more than we can
fathom, so much more than any can know).

The world must evolve, and with it, we too,
traveling forward at the speed of now,
blind and feeble feeling for the path that
lies ahead, a few small steps further on,
past the pale edge of our frantic searchlights.

Let the old world evolve, let the new world erase it

The world you think you know is dead, like a
religion is a spiritual way that
no longer catches a fire in the heart,
but burns brightly only on the kindling
of evolution.

For the past is the wind, all you can do is chase it.

03 MAR 2003

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