Idle Thought

I enter­tained an idle thought and
in that idle thought a grain
Of some­thing that, I think, was pain,
that fell upon my brow like rain.
Yet, I could hard­ly sense those drops
upon my face or hear their thrum;
Sight dim, sound flat, taste ashen and
Scent stale, flesh unfeel­ing — numb.
How active my pulse-throbbing
pas­sion was when first I lit
Life’s promise of a fulness
by no walls, floor, ceil­ing knit!
Expan­sive, infi­nite it stretched
across the cos­mos of my mind,
Until that tiny cos­mic shrine of
self was picked down, mined
Of all its ores raw, ripe, rare;
stripped down threadbare,
Now just a weak knot-rid­den net,
a sieve for hope­less wishfulness,
The so-soon lost we minute-minded
fools for­get in minuteness;
Replaced by banal triv­ia, mundane;
to fold the clothes and steep the tea,
To clock-punch, pen­cil-push, subsist
in ade­qua­cy, to sweep the floor’s debris.
To make our chil­dren just as we,
mechan­i­cal in all their modes,
Spend lives in lay­ing roads to nowhere
and to nowhere car­ry noth­ing loads,
Bur­den of an emp­ty, unlived day
fol­lowed by hun­dreds more unlived as they,
The promise bro­ken, incar­nate tomb;
the gold­en aura of my lot, my doom,
Earn and spend and earn again, sole
move­ment through my being’s room,
And when I wake, each after day,
each yes­ter­day, tomor­row, I am numb
And to feel any­thing at all, each
numb­ing day, bite hard my thumb,
As it whitens ’neeth my yel­low teeth,
I think of how the sun­rays are not warm,
That they can’t cut the gloom-thick
pall of vapor hov­er­ing like a swarm
Over my head and in my eyes, that clogs
my ears with loud white noise,
Stretch­es my tongue, cuts it out —
can’t taste, speak, shout — and destroys.
And as my yel­low teeth break skin and
blood seeps from that shoal-ravine,
I see my past and my soon future
spelled in jaun­dice-yel­lowed spleen
And won­der if this weight is not
a weight that lives alone inside of me,
Some­thing leaked into my ear, that fed
my fear and forced my hope to flee.