Thursday, May 16, 2013

RE-TIRED


Every step is a turned ankle.
It wouldn’t be this way
if there were yet lovely growing water
singing running clean, cold, clear
in the river bed of knowing;
that now is just another dried up spot
on a warring planet killing the low
evaporating every pure drop
exposing all of the loose rivers bed rocks
that we are all forced to tramp upon.

We should spend our steps making concrete
to sew the loose stones together.
Then there would be no more left to throw at each other.
Still as in everything there is a downside,
if the water ever came back clean, cold, clear
it would have no dear voice left with to sing.
Until that dream of a past becomes a present
pain is justified in both the ankle breaks and sprains
coupled to the intellectual thirst with ignorant thought trains.

Every thought these days is a hurt,
a lost passage that is a little grief upon a little grief
until a great mound is grown.
The only relief left the walker now
is the old pebble in the mouth trick
to slake the thirst to simply know
where it was the knowledge
for living together went to?
I suppose that answer I know and knew,
some tuition charging college only meant
for the very elite few who can afford
the ancient wise wet words found in books.

My own ignorance knowing
 has built up to where I now understand
better than before why it is depression
not footsteps or sadness
laid in trails across times sands.
For knowledge kills the knowing
that was meant to be a candle light
in withered weathered hand a way to show.

I traded my portion of happiness
for desire to  understand
why walking dry river beds
only had two outcomes;
two horns to be gored upon.
Flash floods to wash me away
to life not desired nor wanted anymore
or turned in ankles broken again and again
for no matter how much I uncovered,
in my dry stony wadi bed discovered
I found I was still ignorant and shackled
to this ever warring world made by man.

© M Durfee
5/16/13

19 comments:

  1. nice verse man...the first 2 stanzas in particular...finely layered....the loss of the pure water, the struggle through the rocks, throwing them, our own attempts at fixing with concrete and erasing the voice of the river should it come back...all that plays really well together....

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    1. I am sad Brian at all i see and hear of the world we have created for us and our children.

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  2. There is a heaviness here, Mark, a knowing...life is never what we thought it would be and we can't avoid those flash floods no matter how much we seek the higher ground.

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    1. Talon all i ever wanted was mental stability and a modicum of security for humanity to thrive together in new ways of thinking. I have failed in my own thinking.

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  3. When my son was up we went to a local lake that relatively few people know about. There we saw the signs of concrete that had been poured long before being torn up and buried by the land. It gave me a feeling of peace to see it. Sometimes there is nothing much better than to see signs of human civilization being taken down by nature.

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    1. Unfortunately Charles, except in works of fiction we can no longer be able to revert to our nature of tribal hunter gatherer's. Now we have to kill man's beauty for some to outlive the present.

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  4. What a harsh place to be. As if the world might never provide clean water again, or as if being shackled to man kind were a bad thing.

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    1. Alice, like it or not we have succumbed to loss of individuality, at least in the urban areas and have sunk to the lowest common denominator. 13 people shot a couple dead in 24 hours here last week. And with a pile of garbage, mostly plastic the size of Rhode Island floating in the pacific, yes that is an indication of a harsh place. A place that has no care for the very things that sustains it. Easter Island is uninhabited because they didn't know to not conserve resources.

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  5. Such a pity to give up serenity for knowing only to be betrayed by it.

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    1. Yes, Charleston I know I am depressed, but I haven't seen anything of mans good side in such a long time...

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  6. When the Walking Man's first line is a turned ankle... :)

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    1. One last sign of hope is mu accelerator foot is bolstered uo with 8 screws and two steel plates Candace.

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  8. Excellent poetry, as is your way.

    The older I myself get, the more arcane.
    There are still pristine sardine beds in the Bering Sea, where "de fish she is still very small", and not midget herring; The Siberian Taiga is not yet denuded, for who could farm there.

    And all weather starts up on the North Pole.

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    1. Ivan my friend you know as well as I that by the time of my death they will be farming at the poles. Subsistence farming but farming none the less.

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  9. Mark, I hate to hear you so down. Or can you write that way without actually feeling so hopeless? I don't think so. HUGS!! xo

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  10. And in the face of all the evidence, I still hear the people say that there is no climate change or repeating the worn mantra that the climate has been cycling for thousands of years as if the person is a scientist and paleogeologist/climatologist. I don't think there is any hope for the ignorant, Mark. And ignorance is rampant these days.

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So Walking Man I was thinking...