beacon hill park, nov 25

while watching the fading glow of the sun in beacon hill park
late afternoon, over the olympic mountains,
snowy peaks hard over a darkening cloud bank
a pair of women, facing the colours,
wrinkles and glasses around their eyes
one in a shimmery green blazer, head in a loose black car
the other indistinct but turning bright eye
the one in green to the other
"life sure is good isn't it."
"uh huh, mmm", to the sun, eyes, alight
"it just keeps on coming."

and it was dinnertime and its only a month till christmas
and monday is tomorrow morning and month and duties and duties and

Jean Genet, on the mental life of the jailed prisoner.

Jean Genet, on the mental life of the jailed prisoner.
From Our Lady of the Flowers

We occupy our minds with giving ourselves splendid roles through luxurious lives; we invent so many that we remain enfeebled for a life of action, and if one of them comes, by chance, to be realized, we would be unable to be happy in it, for we have exhausted the dry delights (and many a time recalled the memory of their illusion) of the thousand possibilities of glory and wealth. We are blase. We are forty, fifty, sixty years old; we know only petty, vegetative misery. We are blase.
Your turn Marchetti. Don't invent ways of making a fortune, don't buy knowledge of a sure way of smuggling, don't look for a new trick (they're all used up, more than used up)...

---comment---

Move this to 2007 and North America, generations rising to maturity through the television and the movie theatre and say that we're a hundred, two hundred, we're dead, we're past living, we're the ones that are used up, finished, prisoners, our dreams, our myth mined by the cinema and presented back to us as banality, as storylines. Let this be the aim of our actions, not to seize upon and exploit our longings, our daydreams but to enrich and sanctify them as they emerge and tremble...

Utah!

You take land so rare, so fierce
and make it resound with the retorts of your guns,
the thickness of your gospel,
the lowing of cattle sounds to the peaks,
while your highways hum with the speed of a false haste,
cars and trucks rushing to another destination.

This landscape has been too much,
these red bluffs, vast vacant shimmering salt flat lakes
canyons and mesas out of the plains
unbreachable treasuries of earth
their question resounds unanswered

Too much for Joseph Smith, his trail of obedient wagons,
too much for the 15 living prophets
which have followed in an unbroken line of old white men
down to Gordon Hinckley whose flock numbers 13 million
freedom loving souls waiting for heaven.

I see it in your eyes, your retreat to dull certainty,
your capital, its empty core, vacant streets
for what would you do in such a place?
the strip malls, the chains hum with activity,
your televisions pulse while you
pump the hollow music of your organs
through the temples of the church
and the congregation listens mutely,
the dream of the end
echoing happily in their heads
jumping through these days,
the fiery hills left to the lowing cattle.

Heaven, the destination loudly proclaimed
an eternal bliss of filial activity
resounding with the shouts and echoes of familiarity.