LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

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.

Poet, corruption flows upward through the buildings to the clear and foreboding sky. And great loops in the highways bring people back to places they never believed they would return to. 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.

A rival exists. The poet skulks around corners looking for him. The rival has published much 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 this 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.

He is distracted a moment by men who are 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 magnificence of your imagination into the world structure I so despise!