LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

"I too must entertain you, goddamn it, I too must entertain you."

The poet looks at the stranger and sees not simply the character that the stranger could be but the compressed knowledge and experience that rides along the periphery of his heart. It is there lodged in a kind of cage and will not expand.

They come in, they go out and they read his books lounging on the mattress that is shoved against one wall.

"Don't you women understand what state I am in? Don't you understand this?"

They ignore him but, then, say something oracular that penetrates to the center of his intimate concerns and it lets him know that they have thought about his condition.

Day that does not cease. Day that is filled with the remnants of history, with the products of great and forgotten men. Day that unwinds along the paths of yesterday. Day that is entered through steps of trepidation, announced by the curious noise of moving things, intimating the flow of a majestic dream about the celebration held after a terrible conflict that every- one was ashamed of.

Day that is caressed before leaping from the hands of the poet to devour a world.

Day that is fixed like a moth to someone else dream. Day that blasts all previous days.

Day that penetrates the secret terrors of the poet and drives them the four direction.

Day whose laughter lingers into the trailing nights, sets upon the mind propositions that startle it.
Day that the world tries to take away.
Day in which some enemy will draw his aim.
Day that is unchanged by the grinding noise and power of machines.
Day that stutters before all that light can know.