a tale told by an idiot.

by Ambon Pereira

Posted to Poetry on 2003-07-19 21:49:00

not much to say about.
“sometimes i think a person’s life is like
skin, stretched taut
from ankle to elbow.”
neither beginning nor ending, really,
just there.
yeah, that’s it; living and dying,
only the difference between
you and not you. does a man weep
to know he’s not the universe,
a mere speck of self in a mystery of
other? this is what i’m driving at:
here you live, and here you are;
and here is where you’ll always be,
“stretched taut from first breath
to bursting;”
why weep when a fellow dies?
you are still there with him,
in the time that always is;
and who knows, perhaps it’s changing even.
who’s to say that a moment of time
doesn’t dance in place like an atom
in a bed of steel? suppose all of time
just is, but dancing;
suppose we are only reverberations,
music moving up a metal spine.

then again, perhaps i think too much about
what i can’t understand; i was born a fool,
and the habit of thinking hard
isn’t something you lose
to the obvious, even of
futility.

and i suppose this isn’t the poem i wanted to write,
either– i wanted to say something friendly and
meaningful, about what i’ve been reading here;
i wanted to dance something social, don’t know how
i got started on dying;

maybe i’m just a morbid personality;
the first time i ever saw a dead body
was my great-grandfather, and i’m sorry to say
i started laughing, the absurdity of it;
who knows how it happens, why a man takes the world
as he will; for what it’s worth, i loved the man,
even if i can only remember him speaking one word:
“Roosevelt.” i had asked him who was the greatest
president, and he took such a long time in answering
i thought he hadn’t heard me, that maybe he was
already asleep. his voice was like something heavy
and metal being set down; but in his day he’d been
a damn fine ball-player, with one hell of an arm.

i don’t suppose this is the poem i wanted to write,
either, though it’s good to think about someone
you love, even if you hardly know them.

confession: i never quite know where i’m going,
a month from now i might be in moscow or
cambodia, i’m just about a close as a person can
come to being chaos. some greek daemon,
maybe there’s a statue of me somewhere with its
head rotted off. i’ll leave it to your imagination
which one.

i write this shit as if i were unwinding string
in a labyrinth, as if it were my claim on
tommorow, after i meet the minotaur
but the problem is
that the monster is actually me,
i am the minotaur and i started out as
theseus, i’d like to believe i’ll come out of this
a human being, and not some gross abstraction
of myself, that’s the danger
of thinking too much about everything;

ah well. what’s the point?
pointing backwards, a man walking away with his
hand held high, walking from the flames and saying
there, that is where i come from. time is
and i am taut as a drum, ratta-tat-tat,
how about that. have you ever held a tibetan
prayer-bowl? you rub a wooden mallet along
the bowl’s rim, and it just starts singing.
reverberation. a brass bowl dancing in place
like a moment in time, or like the entire life
of a man.

that’s almost it. almost what i mean to say.