A poem that insists on its being called “Babel”
It’s an escape from the cold, cold earth,
A shadowed egg of Fabergé
Filled with puss and flem
And connector tubes.
With no mother hen to call its own,
You’re sure to sleep for thousand years,
Awakening in a new localle
Where no one would do such a sad silly thing
As cast the sonic cellhouse of a word in black on white
And call it “jazz” or “thoughts of fire”
And all that jazz. They’d sooner
Burn your sad parade
Of verbish clowns in distressed paint
Lined up like soldiers, banner high, ready to charge on Babel,
Which was a real place with people and chairs
Swept up in the showers of an imagined tower
Filled with rooms where sandmen sleep, recalling
Memories of deer-drawn Morpheus,
Pathetic in their revery,
And if, one day, their slumber ceased
They’d crawl to dusty desks and link
Lombroso’s dozen graphs
Into a final, fleeting
Theory of not.
But where the shadow cracks they have no time
For such nonsense. The cold, cold earth
Has been beaten and burned
Into a festival of corn.
The ears fall to the dust of dead kings
Who rule the dirt in pride and silent arrogance,
Caked in their own domain.
Oh, and in Babel there was also a dog,
Who caught whiff of the invisible shade
Cast, like magician in top hat and tails, by the spire, enveloping all
That he and his masters
Ever would or could be, every dream and desire,
To a hairbrained scheme [it’s crazed, curled enacters] that
Lives on in insults and accents and just-faded sheen.
He barks at the tower,
It crumbles without incident,
A man from Mexico City loses his vision,
And ears fall silent
To the dust of dead kings.
