Exile

 

Goofball high at the crack of dawn

Wandering the empty streets

Gazing tearfully at vagrant woman

Sitting on the moonwalk steps

Along Mississippi River bank,

Her grey hair and haggard visage

Speaking of hungry nights on the street

Her worldly possessions in an old army backpack

The French Quarter tourists oblivious

To the holy vessel of humanity in their midst

 

She gazes gauntly

From eyes too weary to weep

The craggy face of her sad soul

Stares from darkened holes

Lost in timeless memory

Of childhood, when life was a game

But knowing as sure as the turgid blood

Which flows through withered veins

That life is not a game

Because nobody gets out alive

 

The city long past caring

Since the Goddess was vanquished

Banished from the human heart

And mammon became master of man

My memory persistent as time

Déjà vu images of playgrounds

Tiny children spinning on merry go rounds

Death defeated in dizzying motion of youth

As I reminisce the old school

Where cruel laughter once erupted

From taunting specters of kids

Who found kindness too wearisome

In the solitude of their souls

 

The dream continues to unfold all around me

Till people emerge from slumber

Ferry horn blaring across the sheet of river water

Hungry eyes seeking some sort of redemption

From the machine which processes lives

Into a faultless order of nature

Natural as puma preying on rabbit

Beyond good and evil

Carving up the world with knives and forks

Devouring the very marrow of life

Leaving an anemia of the spirit

 

My dreams unfold a path

Out of the wilderness of steel

God’s silence a liberation

As I wind through the circuitry of the city

Looking for an out through an in