LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

And what was left were the poorly lit buildings, the iron-encased pawn shop and the old white queer bar and the new fast-food places as people walk, rumbling past it all on their way to something. The gentleness in the faces that passed the poet by! The innocent vitality and quiet radiance. Children collected on the stops of the library. A young woman asked them, "what do you do in a library!" and the collective shout came back, "be quiet!" She was flustered. "Well, that's not all." Inside the library, people had come to themselves again and were as familiar to the poet as the books on the shelves. Some of the regulars had recollected themselves reading the back issues of magazines and were already wondering if they were bold enough to be human and attain the simplicity of the heart all the while the evidence of things were intruding, pulsing, demanding around them; laughing maniacally the madness of convulsive abstractions. The machines laugh.

It was the night after the poet had felt some presence of a corporeal devil and as it insinuated from his mind he felt lightness and tremor; the roundness of a thousand scenes and a sense of not wanting the feeling to end.

Yes, when evil leaves the soul truth rushes in.