LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

Among the disputes in the hot atmosphere of politics, the poet bakes; but, he also plies his trade and understands that politics is an equation that must be maintained. The talk of freedom fills itself with belief and begins to shout down its opponent; its ally. The poet sees the disputants as faces on the same screen; he wears their poses until he laughs, "ah, this can't be done. Someday they will shoot at each other. There is nothing I can do about it."

The crowds are entertained but unmoved. The poet is moved but slightly disturbed or disappointed at the gulf between the opponents.

For the poet, there is nothing more real than freedom. It is the substance that speaks to the poet in parables and dreams. He is thrown back by his limitations to the painful realms of conscious life and, in a moment, sees that he will be better than what he believed he could be.

The initiation into freedom!

Crude but sophisticated people desire power over the people. The lonely people who beat themselves down. And when they win their victory over the people they celebrate by inviting their friends to feast on the goods that have accumulated during the campaign. Intoxicated, they eat what the people have given them and know that, already, they scheme against the best intentions of the people and what they carry between themselves in the form of the society. "These people are thieves," one of the innocent people finally admits after years of naivete. However, the poet listens cautiously since he knows that an alchemical process begins in the people and predicts history.

The poet assumes this: That men and women search for the place where they are most productive. That if the authority of a land makes productivity a chief goal then good people will come.

He writes in his notebook. He leaves his apartment and walks through the city to the park where he fastens together the pieces of the city he has seen.

No, he thinks to himself, if I did not feel productive under this political state I lived under I would go somewhere else. The wounded hunt the globe for the spot where they are the most productive.