While Busy Making Other Plans …

The eucalyptus leaves twitter against

The dull, flat sky. Is the sun’s absence

Punishable? The brain awakens more slowly

Than the muscles, the bones, the tissues

All twitching with energy pent up

In the inert but harrowing night, while the brain

Lumpen and inactive in the skull,

Sends rote signals here and there,

Without reflection. Random movements

Like the cat’s prowling through the labyrinths

Of back yards. Memory, knowledge, beauty,

Truth trapped on neural roads closed for repair.

It’s like the gray nest of wasps secluded in the eaves,

Light, sound, color, movement pokes it, keeps

Poking it until tractable thought comes pouring forth,

Buzzing, swarming, an angry chaos that erupts

Into the murmur of imagination, into speech, into

The reckoning that carries the bones and tissues

And organs into the tunnels and passages

Of another gray and bewildering day.

 

 © Dennis Hathaway

 

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I wish to be loved and admired,

And yet know that I am not.

I appear cold, indifferent, hostile even.

Now and then an acquaintance will say

Did someone die? And I will say,

What are you talking about?

Even though I know the answer.

Or I will smear my face with an

Idiot’s grin and flap my tongue,

Seeking what I most fervently crave–

To be left alone.

 

Sometimes that works,

And sometimes it doesn’t.

Meddlers don’t easily give up,

Appointing themselves to rescue

Others from solitude, that state

Of egocentric bliss, a place beyond

The shifting contours of expression,

Where the things they think they see,

Cannot be seen,

Where the things they think they know,

Cannot be known,

Where laughter and song cannot be shared,

With the hard, uncaring world.

 

 © Dennis Hathaway

 

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There was no collusion, they say,

And what does it mean, exactly?

That there was no praise of bigots,

No fawning over murderous dictators,

No contempt for the weak, the helpless,

No violent bending of the truth?

 

There was no collusion, they say.

As children search for lost parents,

As bombs fall like summer rain,

As mothers weep and fathers

Wander bewildered in a world

Scrubbed clean of empathy and kindness

A world of avarice and cruelty

Celebrated in song and image,

A world burning up and drowning,

A world to enter only at your peril.

 

 © Dennis Hathaway

 

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