Sifting Detritus

Rolf Auer, 22 June 2014

Extracting the
windblown garbage from the small grove
on the other corner.
Sunday, dayday, Sun all day
to a dangerous degree,
the congregation exiting the Church
down the street.
Kitty-corner to it
a confectionary for
smokers and
cross-wearing rootbeer addicts;
the clerk smiles as he
takes your money.
Across the street, on the corner where the
Sun rises, a rose bush with a hundred
white roses. I reach up, pull down
one thorny branch which
bears one perfect rose. The scent
is exhilarating, unlike any other
and I go back at the end of my sojourn
a second time. No love by another
name smells as sweet, no dove in another sky
flies quite as high.
Perhaps you can find someone wholl forgive
your neverending wars, and while youre
looking for them, try to also find someone
wholl forgive your death-
by-garbage destruction of the climate.
I accept neither the dying of the light
nor its rage. I strive to renew myself,
make myself presentable for the final conflict.
Im leaving as I came, naked, except for my
teddy bear which has
needle-sharp teeth and claws.

They did not find a discarded
backpack with a Canadian flag
sewn on the back of it, beside where the thermite
had melted the cruel mouth of the giant thousand-mile-long
lamprey sucking the black bitumen blood out of the Earth.
Instead they found
sharp stainless steel teeth and claws
and teddy bear scat.
Home again, home again, and no knock
on my door from costumed conquistadors
guarding by day the vested interests of the meritocracy and
guarding by night the Vestal Virgins of their minds.
Too bad. I was seeking any kind of publicity for
the environmental eco-action group to which
I belong, the Bad News Bearcubs aka
the Violent Teddy Bears, and their lack of
interest left me feeling unsatisfied and unnewsworthy.

These timeworn castoff thoughts
have aged me despite my best
efforts to remain young. I crave
originality as the elixir of life
and, unable to obtain it, my
fingers unsteadily fumble through my aimlessly greying hairs
hiding my subconscious thoughts from myself like a
bug hides in a snug vug in a rug.
I once delighted in licking the icing
off beater spoons, in the intricacies of
shoelace knots, in the innocent wonder
shining brightly through my eyes
illuminating the earth and the heavens
and reflected by all the myriad stars above.
And now I focus on chipped paint, potholes,
and the unrelenting passage
of time across the March of Dimes. As humans,
we forsook our innocence in our rush to enter the Atomic Age
having in effect only just exited the Age of Agriculture.
We are old before our time. This potters field
of war-torn thoughts has prematurely aged us,
has left me cold and old. I can no longer
face my mirror.

Where has the time gone? Where is the star engine?
Where is the immortality drug? These thoughts are
buried in the debris field under
liquefied layers of languid time, the settling of water table
accounts, the reckoning of the state of progress and the state of the environment,
retarded by war. They cannot
percolate, circulate, nor precipitate. Thought is stagnant, sedentary,
solitary. Thought has not aged well, it is a bitter libation, so
please do not think that The Lord God is not offended.