A poem for a man who stood up and stood out.
He washed dishes, without complaint. He smiled. Even.
He washed the floors and did not leave stains. The building was grateful but the men were not. Neither were the women at whom he howled like the real man he was. This was the man with the long name who came from the southern parts and drove a Mercedes to compensate for the fact that no one , but no one had an idea that he drove a Mercedes. The unfairness of God is in the acres of rice, the nimble feet of men in black pajamas. Some grave is not given, but attained. The whole East is attained. The Sun, even, is attained before it rises. A sacrifice is made in the dark. Or so it was and so it is written. The man left the garage and entered the glaring phosphorescent light of the adulterating friction. His shadows passed him and then he saw the man that saw him back. Loud chants across the dining hall marked their opulent disdain for the hierarchies. To strike fear in the heart of a friend was the message. The effect was merely a milked cow and a pleasant spasm to reek of opulent vice.
The magnificent corpse of the dead animal strewn out of the sky like it was nothing, like death was not the fly attracting, shifty shadow that it evidently is… but so death always disguises itself as symbol.
“Have you hewn the mighty carcass of Jonah’s whale, are you the pickaxe of fate?” the old archer rambled as he read my cards and I inspected his aura for trauma. I said “I believe not so much. I feel like I have just been swallowed.” He looked at me and laughed. “Wiseass”, he said. “I mean it.” I added. He looked up and said: “Know thyself old martyr”. And suddenly I saw a reflection of myself in his face. I was like “huh?”
How had he been supposed to have known? It had been so dark that a pale light was creeping up from the end of the sky, death was a guitar waiting to be struck.
The hordes came lashing with flamed tongues for a moment but then disappeared in the mist. What was between me and the abyss was only my hope for a bridge, that would appear under my feet…
Grass… I remember. I once stood out in the hills on a warm spring, a little angel was with me then scolding me at every step of the way.
Loveliness keeps arising in the hills, but no one ever calls out her name, and the butterflies, hired to accompany the dance, turn back to cocoons. Grey death, boredom.
How an aquamarine sea bed or lake surface touches the minds eye and conducts her away from herself, into “me”, as they say, where she turns red and dark and presses upward with the pulse of gravity into an eternity of pain, before an awakening into an aquamarine sky.
Emerald, an abandoned harp, elegant absence in the full moon.
Sadness. The sun here feels like rain, cold half frozen sticky sickly rain and wine does not help. Food is scarce, not readily available, never fresh. The air tastes of metal but not the kind you taste in blood. The kind you smell in airports. In fact the city feels like an airport, only it’s not tax-free. It feels like tax, like a tax-form. Friendliness feels like a curse under the breath. Footsteps like an army of beasts of burden with official liberty but no will to enjoy it or to realize what it entails. A man sits down into my booth to wait for his family members bathroom break to end and does not even look at me to acknowledge his intrusion. He is old, but it does not redeem him. He is not senile. He is just Dutch.
This used to be one of my favorite tracks on the Dark Side of the Moon album, I think. The guitar solo, especially. Another favorite is the one in Beat It, and in Let it Be. (Strangely similar names).
[…]
Listening I must say the memory of the songs of this album blended together in a swamp of magic, with the exception of Money, a mild distraction, and “the Lunatic is on the Grass” which is genuinely disconcerting and prophetic of dark probabilities in other lives.
There she was, blood all over
but it was all natural, she told me.
She walked out and I followed. I noticed I was dizzy.
The swinging door nearly barely missed my head. I noticed I was awake.
The music switched on. The smoke was there and the strobes flashed.
I looked around and saw nothing, pleasantly. No discernible objects or subjects.
I strolled along the fluids and plastic on the black linoleum. All I could see was my feet and my heels kicked up and the next part of my life I spent dancing in the dark and the rainbow smoke.
Faces, scared and yearning, asking. When the only answer is a kiss I may well draw a blank. Not that night. “That’s something” she said to my alternative. Frail, nice, honey red. My type, I guess - or I’m hers, or maybe that’s the same now. The music dims and life fades out. No death now, just impending rebirth.
Sentiment and confusion, let me reproduce you, unfaithfully like you are.
