LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

He is distracted a moment by men crawling on their hands and knees in the street. Ah, he thinks, the businessmen are conducting business. They are sincere and I respect sincerity. But, the women fascinate him the most. He is a scientist among women. He avoids those who want to save the souls of men and concentrates on women who convert their domesticity into ambition. They glide purposefully through the crowds on a drizzly, foggy afternoon. The air tastes of ions. There are no conversations. Noise is absorbed into the noise of vehicles and jets. Ah, businesswomen, you have converted the magnificance of your imagination into the world structure I so despise!

The poet has a simple goal. "I want to see the same face twice in one year." He, like the people, travels in small bands that shuttle between each other. The paltriness, the terrible paltriness, he thinks. The paltriness has made them predictable and behind them stand structures that study their predictable nature. An elderly man grabs his arm in a discussion and tells him there is need for order.

"There has to be a degree of predictability if there is going to be order."

"And what if the people die of it? What happens when the people are not inspired beyond the simple movements of everyday life?"

"The damn people don't even know how to move in the same basic and simple way," the old man mutters.

Yellow light flashes along the side of sad, worn buildings. Encapsulated music drives the brain like a weapon from ones' worst enemy. Discordant acts filter through the morning fog to play merrily on the rays of the sun. Parties have started early, raging in the house of the judge. The poet wants to take his mind to the sea. Laughter is heard through the salt-guilt of the stone city. People come and pass, touch the lovely items in the garden. They speak pleasantly to old women who run antique stores.

You want progress? I want to be an old man in the Persia of Xerxes. What bureacracy will pass me along? All I am is a mind, a simple instrument, a world.