Quantum Dream

Bonds
Are mutually
Reinforcing.

But the opposite holds true.

Distance
And neglect build
An ever yawning chasm.

The games
That children play
Draw them closer.

But the opposite holds true.

Wars force
Nations apart
As the children's bodies pile.

Kiss the mirror
And grow nearer
To the other world
Where things still whirl,
Just the opposite way.

If I had my way,
I would spend my days
In a field at play
With the children,

Playing Molecule Ball
When each child can call
Where the ball will fly
And what it becomes
When it lands with a sigh:

A friend bearing ice cream,
A blue and white kite,
Balloons on a long string,
A dog that won't bite -

The waking world follows
A magical logic that leads to the gallows.
What the world needs
Is the science of dreams
Where the children lead and every man follows.

Labor Day

And what should we say remains
Of the workers in the days of trains?
And what should we say
Of your grandfathers
And your grandmothers
And the world they sought to claim?

Only the murals remain for us to see
Of men in soiled shirts straining to free
A generation from American serfdom
Through telegraph poles, railways,
And onward to freedom.

Down in a lost town, a lonely post office sits,
Its mural of men as giants on tractors and combines;
While the giant women fed the workers in long lines.

Now, those sculpted workers that stared into the future,
Their eyes grave, their jaws set, their brows furrowed,
Look on a present day no one had thought would follow.

For the government halls are empty of the spirit of the common good,
And the death song has long been sung of the union’s brotherhood,
And the silence that was heard before the strike at last was called
Is buried by the laugh of the rich men and their lawmakers in thrall.

What shall we say of Labor Day
That will carry any meaning
To your sons and daughters
Who, one fine day,
Will want to work with faces beaming?

Forgotten workers are lives in vain
Unless we, too, united strain
To ease the modern worker’s sorry plight –
Democracy dies without a fight.

The Stranger

Blind, brutal sex with the stranger –
It pleases the body
But not the soul.

Quietly,
In the darkness of the midnight bed,
The soul cries itself to sleep;
It is the sleep of the little death
That comes with the dream of remembering.

Yet soon enough,
Oh, soon enough,
Comes the hour of forgetting
With the rising of the sun.

Soon enough
It is another clear, mirror day
When nobody sees and nobody stares
At the hole in the soul
Carelessly placed there
By the sighs of the stranger.

Dessert

I was born into a trap,
Not of my making,
From which there is no escape –

Centuries of ancestors
Threw their wiles into the fires,
Their passion, their power,
Their mad ambitions,
And their terrible beauty,

To forge this cunning cage.

There is no point to rage
Against these bars I cannot bend,
This lock I cannot open:
No escape until the end.

How you – and the world – stare
At this prisoner on a stage,
At these sinews under tight, smooth skin,
At these dark eyes that draw you into sin,
At these full lips that

Hide the tongues of fire
Within the steel trap of a smile.

I want to explain the origin of the universe to you;
I want to shout the intelligence of generations –
How is this and that and why not now or then
But perhaps one day somewhere.

And all this to save you from your own traps, and
The millions of traps that walk the cities of this world
With stealthy strides and hide in plain sight and
In the corners of the night.

But these full lips you simply bite
In the last dark hour, as I pour out my power,
Robbing you of sight and hearing;
From me no explanation – just a moan, searing –
Our cold sweat sealing
The doom of the prophets who died in the deserts.