Sunday, May 26, 2013

HARD LESSONS



CAUTIONARY TALES I
Exploding in my head are four thousand three hundred and thirty eight thoughts I thought were gone; dead, proven wrong. Rushing back in to flood my comfortable well-worn ways of getting along with them I put up with just because that seems given to me to be the only way left to live. Go along, get along, never speak out against that which is wrong and then remember four thousand three hundred and thirty eight thoughts I thought were gone. There is little goodness left in life’s time, grandma doesn’t bake cookies anymore and father isn’t around to boot me in the ass reminding me not to be stupid as I walk out the door. I never really knew how alone I was until I aged away from caring about working to be a better man, one who only wanted to help. I still leave tracks for the weight upon me has not lightened, my aging step only made it slower. I have met so many men who said “follow me, follow me and I will lead you to the land of you will see” but I have only met one who I have never laid an eye upon who told me only fools follow and there are places no man yet living should ever see. Now where am I? My feet have done what my mind could not but in the doing of it I lost sight of any good that may be left in the whole of humanity and yes that sounds like whine not made from water but tears. I could use the knife and draw its blade upon my skin curled in a dark corner in the fetal position and it would only prove that I can yet bleed. Something I still know needs not be proven again. I’d like life, I know that feeling but it has been so long now since those days have come and gone. All I can desire is freedom but the closer the end comes the further it falls from me. So I stay isolated in my mind, no longer trying to find that which has so long eluded me—a single, one word thought, maybe the number is wrong it should be four thousand three hundred and thirty nine thoughts of amity, I have forgotten, left behind me.

© M Durfee
5/26/13



CAUTIONARY TALES II
Yes it’s true
I hear the ghosts
of eighty thousand abandoned homes
murmuring in the night,
not in whispers
but muted conversations
about the days of used to be.

Louder are the sirens
chasing the red light runners.
Cops safely blinded
never seeing the prostitutes
and other people of the street,
the homeless and the gang bangers
standing on corners claimed,
loosing their death sold in dime bags
in those places
that once were gathering spots for people
who only wanted to get to
the market on the other side of the street.

I have come to see
I am living in the future of man.
I am living the end results of plans
made a century ago when the innovators
and machinery creators
had amassed such great amounts of liquid capital
they, in their dollar backed power,
decided what would maximize profit for them
with no future thought of how the children of those
whose backs birthed their net worth would live
when all was let go, stripped bare, abandoned.

We all climb through the days as if
we were actually getting somewhere.
But the night, it is the night now
where progress is made.
Upward growth for them
who are building a net worth
and deciding the fate of them
in whose veins their products flow.

We live at night,
that is when the good times grow capital.
For it is then they think no one sees or knows
what it is I hear when the ghosts
of eighty thousand abandoned homes
murmur of how things used to be.

© M Durfee
5/26/13
 

10 comments:

  1. Well written. Well wept.


    ALOHA from Honolulu
    Comfort Spiral
    ~ > < } } ( ° > <3

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  2. I enjoyed your first piece, but the second one---blew me away. That should be read aloud to many. It resonates. I can see the homes murmuring amongst each other. VERY POWERFUL..You are the reason that people appreciate the written word and all it's wonderful useage. Sorry for the gushing...(not really)xoxo

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  3. I work nights ... watching over sick people ... I used to think about sleep that it is a waste of time ... but that's when we grow.

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  4. Such a weight and a wealth here, Mark.

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  5. Thoughts do never seem to decrease. It's why I used to drink, to shut the thoughts up. Now I just try to keep thinking one thought and use it as a wall against the others.

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  6. Well written indeed, as says Claudia. Honest to the point of keening pain.

    I came to your impasse early, at forty. I was divorced and broke.
    This was surely crisis, but I missed the opportunity.

    "I like your writing," said an editor.
    "Give me anything, anything at all by you, and I'll publish it."

    So I gave him something:

    "I woke up this morning undecided whether to shave or cut my throat"

    Rejection on a sure thing.Bathos. Back into the funk.
    Ah well. The thing about anxiety, is that it is self-limiting.
    I finally got a column in a magazine all my own.

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  7. I never really knew how alone I was until I aged away from caring about working to be a better man...dang, that line got me in the first but the second...started haunting me right away with all the empty homes...night is a much better time for me as well...yet still those houses haunt...

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  8. Whew, specially on the last stanza ~ Many things happen in the night and we all grieve for those whose dreams have all been taken away ~

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  9. I never could be silent but as I watch all I have ever been slip away from me I think it best that I chronicle it myself. I am in a physical place that died years ago and now the gathering of humans that at least kept it as death warmed over are dispersing someone need make note of it.

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  10. Mark, if those walls could talk and not just murmur! Stories of once proud to all sorts of tragedies. xo

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So Walking Man I was thinking...