Slouching Closer to First Sins
She sat on a universal
A universal space and time
Not of her making
It was hers by right
And everyone knew it
Many decades later
Some would call this
Into question
Timidly
Decades after that
Aggressively and with anger
They would question the universal
Itself
They would question the idea
That anyone can really see anything
From anywhere
Without all but nullifying
What they see
Because
Motives
Because
Privilege
Because
The stain of being human
But she was dead
Long dead
And laughed six feet under
The Ghost in the Mirror
The judgment of Paris
Or Detroit
Or Dubai
Is hubris in search of
The tauntingly absurd
In search of
The stunningly tone deaf
As in
The most human thing in the world
We are forever belated
And that endears us to the gods
They
Just like the dead
The woman from before
The one six feet under
Know this feel this smell this
In all encounters
With a Sapien’s vision of itself
Its vain preoccupations served up
On ice-cold platters
We struggle for acceptance
Based on ideals so new
So precarious
So devoid of sustainability
The winds howl with derision
And call us fickle
I want to find a pre-Freudian
Post-conscious
Enclave garden jungle bridge
Where no one has seen us
Secure against further partitions
En solidarité march on!!
The New Romanticism
There was a sparkle in his eye
As he saw the light in hers
It went back and forth
That light that fire
As if the two Sapiens
Had erected light beam sculptures
To share
To connect
To bridge all differences
Eye to eye
Heart to heart
Forty years soon enough
Just in time
Serendipitous
More or less
Usually and mostly always
We do this kind of thing
When it’s far too late
To matter
Or we do this kind of thing
Without noticing what we’ve done
Under cover so to speak
Behind doors closed to us
To our belabored readings
Of ourselves
Shut off
Separated by some fear some thing
We can’t see
Like the flower in the trash
The laughing child
On the playground two streets over
The whiff of five star meals
From the corner dive
There was magic between them
And they missed it
Or
There was magic between them
And they found it
Or
There is no such thing
And they jumped on the nothing
That is
The fiction that isn’t
Which is what Sapiens are best at
Missing things right under our noses
Inventing things that couldn’t exist
Without the right spark
Between I and thou
—by Douglas Pinson