Variation

This is a variation of a poem I posted earlier, Fire, See the World Through the Eyes of Fire. Both are drawn from a manuscript that dates from January 2007. I was unsatisfied with earlier versions of the poem and rewrote it from the manuscript. Then I realized there were two or three poems in the same manuscript, and this one emerged, with some of the lines being similar or the same. There was the poem about the 4 elements, and a poem about being interrupted in the midst of writing a poem, and the bad feeling I had writing it. Last night these lines jumped out at me, and so I post them as a variation. That may be inapt; maybe the other poem is a variant of this one. Or maybe they aren’t varieties at all. I don’t know what they are.

 

Variation

 

Through the eyes of office

See the fire in the ceiling

Rushing like a cockroach for the corners

It is hopeless my eyes water

And my mind yawns empty patterns

Of things to come as if the smallest

Manifest dream burned flesh

 

In the lunchroom they are under pressure

Like a coelecanth they explode

They riot with their shit

 

Someone walks in no one can think again

He eats potato chips with an open mouth

A monster from the elemental cosmos

A man whose fire is so separate from his land

That he scortches trees with his head

And watches the dusk and clouds

No sun just the dark buildings

And the sky of dimpled tin

Bare gradations of grey so fine

As to fade into all facades of stone
Light up as he goes by