A Poem

A metaphysical riff, for the Day of the Dead

The Day of the Dead 

This moment of disintegration, revelation:

Awaken me.

Cauterize me.

A saucerful of symbols no longer related to tangible things.

Artillery pounds the black skies,

Today new ghosts will be made. 

I could walk among broken tombs, stone mausoleums;

Cimetiere Montmartre;

Lay orchids for the departed, 

Reflect sentimentally upon

My life in the bush of ghosts. 

Pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s grave, 

Baudelaire’s grave… 

flowers of evil, decadence, excess…

Where are those spirits now? 

Atoms of their hair and fingernails 

in every breath we take. 

Time dissipating, crystallizing;

Statues of angels with sightless eyes.

We yearn for that “dimension” 

beyond time and space

Tasteless, odorless, involuted, fractal.

“Eternity is in love with the productions of time,”

Wrote William Blake. 

Everything already happened 

Long ago. I feel neither nostalgia 

nor attachment, neither

Regret nor anticipation. 

In a detached, philosophical sense, 

It is instructive to witness

Human ape stupidity, greed, hate, ignorance 

Dissolve a planetary ecology,

Drive every living thing to extinction, 

Brandish nuclear warheads and bio-weapons, 

Pretend there is meaning to national destiny,

Grip onto obsolete ideology,

Gossip and fret.

The whole Earth wobbling

Like those spirits trapped in the in-between;

Confused, lost, wandering, 

Globs of quantum foam. 

The good, the true, the beautiful:

Rilke: “Does the space we dissolve into

Taste of us, then?” Who knows?