From Honey to Ashes

Source: Pixabay

What follows is terms and classifications, the West 

Of speech congratulating itself within

A system so complex there’s no way not to be 

Effective. Just as they had planned the streets

On either side are lined with all that’s needed,

Storefronts whose glass returns a look 

Filled with the contents it displays

(Mannequins, organics, mobile phones)

Making even moving sitting still, an embrace

Above anything that’s so. Cuts and clouds

Drift south across the far part of the sky

From adventure to instruction, so where

There is only the mildest threat of showers

You see a shape and then a story, parody 

Of the private life of the world.

And what was promised to the mind of the hearer 

In transformation remains away, ideal 

Portrait there is a certain pleasure in reading

As buffer against what today sends tomorrow.

It’s like forgetting that part of childhood

In which one learned to do everything 

From the pages of a book not unlike 

A painting, but a painting with motion 

In its idle depths, down where dusk meets 

Foreclosure and the clouds charge out

Into the gift of seeing them forthrightly 

Pass by a thing that might have happened, public

Pleasures that progress, the horizon, etc.

Always more or less just starting out

Its day, though it would be better to call it

A grouping sent down through suffering

To sunset, signed in the same place by night

To win over the jury in advance; it’s a painting 

Of the burning of a book whose content is

Colors, lights, flowers, fragments of bone 

Taken from the wound, from greater and lesser 

Distances, to tell the bad from the good,

Buy the evening’s groceries in every sense. 

What follows is seven dominated days 

Of the week ready to bind with really anything

At all, your thoughts as you come forward

Out of the haze like sun through a curtain

Or go to sleep so as to be of further use—

You would like to choose between them

But aren’t these one and the same task?

~ Geoffrey G. O’Brien