LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

The bookseller, a friendly, slightly balding gentleman, knows that the poet is someone other than the person who appears in the street in the afternoon, at the peak of business traffic.

The bookstore is banked on one side by a heavy wall of volumes, with a ladder for those who need to get to the top. Few people are in the store in the late afternoon. Classical music plays in the background. Wonderful announcements are tacked on the bulletin board across from the cash register.

Home at last! Joy zips through the poets mind. He is in the town of the mighty words. He is where the mind rests in the elements of old dreams, to revive the spirit that sags under the weight of manic noise.

The conversation between the bookseller and the poet is a happy one, unsubdued and a kind acknowledgment that they are both striving for something that other people cannot readily detect.

The poet has been reading mystics of late. The mystics claim that there are realms in the mind more real than the world built up outside the mind, and further, that there is a direct relation between the two. The poet thinks slightly out loud as he reads the passage and slaps the open book with his hand in a gesture of solidarity with the thought. It inspires in the poet the realization that he must pay attention to his own thoughts since they may be the formation bloc for a new world in the future.

Certainly his mere experience has taught him that the mind has capacities outside the range of the established city. The city is interested only in energy and not in the information of energy into higher states of experience and rational thought.

The rapture of the mystic is a direct resolution of realizing that everything is contained within the mind and so they are effective and inalienable from the world , the universe, the spirit of life.

The poet does a happy dance in the aisles of the bookstore.

There is an animated life that does not know of its other responsibilities . The poet grasps early on that there are eternal responsibilities not being attended to by those who animate life. It is a responsibility that will haunt the poet no doubt will drive him to drive responsibility to the bone. Many days the poet will perform tricks to bring this strange act into being. intangibility. Release me from the responsibilities that animate the life around.

That is a secret silent chant in the loneliest of rooms in the city of happy laughter.

Nature loves the poet even as the people despise him. He stands in the crowd watching construction of a building . The people are silent as though a benediction is taking place; as though what is missing is a thing directly from them the people. Yes, perhaps the poet thinks to himself and yet why don’t you understand that everything that is built has an integral that is not yours.

There is a portion of mind that disappears, like the spider, like workmen into the hallow shell of the non-completed.