LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

The poet smiles at the ideologues just as the ideologue attempts to cajole him to his side. "And what side is it that you want me to adhere to? Your neurotic side? That's all I see in you. You want to transform me into an ignorant man musing about things I have no connection with?" "But," he cries, "don't you see the necessity to take our side?"

The poet understands the core that animates the ideologist but, all the while, has far more sympathy for the dynamo that keeps the city alive.

The poet says, "I speak with my living heart and living mind. All else is superfluous to me. I am naked to the elements of what creates and destroys. You ideologists are simply playthings for those elemental forces and you tell me, because I am naked, I should join you."

The poet detects in the ideologist a clever ability to pick up the vatic energies of youth that streams from the head like useless light. He detects a similar method with the drug dealer and marks them both as purveyors of addictions.

The poet, who above all else should hate the market place, admits his hatred before he begins a protracted study of the market place. "What I hate is the truest guide to what I am alienated from; therefore, the thing I need to know the best."

Days exist, moments, and in the future his youth will be seen as foolishness. Look at how old myths can grip the human being and drive the most susceptible of men past the threshold of common sense! Oh, terrible moment when the poet sees that the gods die! And that God only exists at the minds exhaustion at the barriers of knowledge. Yet, for him, there is nothing more real than God, nothing more real than the thresholds that await at the lip of the minds exhaustion.

The nature that contains us laughs at us. God is over the threshold! Aha. Does not that implicate Power? Does that not mean that the mind must know everything that it has produced up the the point of exhaustion? Then! It will know the threshold point, then! It will renew its relation to God.

What a happy thought to suffer the poet through his lonely dreams and days!

Earth that contains the human and inhuman
Earth that contains the whirlwind.
Earth that contains the emigration of people.
Earth that plays havoc with the imagination.
Earth that searches through itself for beauty.
Earth that is proof of itself and leaps from itself into the bosom of uncreated universes.
Earth, adamantine, glistening in the green clouds of your lovely dreams.
Earth that contains all geometry, all theories, all experiment, filling itself up and feeding eternity on the brains of men.

The poet experiences the true spirit of home; all is possible in the domain of a few square blocks!