LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

The world collapses. Will your words support it as it descends? It descends, he descends and pities and sees the secret of women float by him as they store away more wisdom, even pity it as they wait the appropriate moment. As the poet descends more he cries out to the faces of passing women, "endless cycles of pleasure and inanimate humiliations will cost you your innate wisdom, your secrets. You will become mere manipulation."

Eye of the poets sadness in shaded city parks in cold November when the ships crash on rocks and the bridge has an icy appeal from a distance like a friend we can not reach.

Downtown, where the birds collect on dropping wires, the poet imagines the city as an act of nature flowing in and out of itself until it carries its own understanding from top to bottom. A wall of insidious faces manipulating buttons and levers as if heaven would emerge from the street as in ancient plays.

"Poet," the wind says, "corruption flows upward through the buildings to the clear and foreboding sky. And great loops in highways bring people back to places they never believed they would return to." He watches the poor and dead line the fume-filled avenue to salute heroes locked away in their hearts.

I will transform you into my own, he hears.

The rival is around. The poet skulks around corners looking for him. The rival has published in anthologies and is surrounded by people. Isn't there a place we could go to fight it out and see who's strongest? The line will suffer. The line will wither under his complacency. The word will not break open under these circumstances. "Rival," he mumbles among the traffic, "you are clever with language and play with it as though it has no meaning. It is a living being. Cities have died for a word or lack of one."

If he cried outloud who would not threaten him and pull him down to the transients who have been, too, poets and dreamers?

The rival is spotted in a restaurant but the poet declines the opportunity to introduce himself. The rival looks academic and is wearing a casual suit. You have sucked at the Muse's tit but she has delivered a slow poison, he thinks. You have bragged of her hard nipples and soft breasts and laughed about it. You have missed the keys of meaning that dangle from everyone's belt.