Flow Chart: A Poem Read Online Free Page B

horrible idea
    of prolonging beyond night and dawn one’s predilection for quoting old
    dispatches and getting into hot water, and then? The sullen bathroom
    question lasted, I was too far out into it, out of pocket, plus the by no means negligible
    question of my own comfort to be decoded, and all other arguments
    suddenly collapsed, like a dream of homecoming. How stung my myth;
    my dream wasn’t over, we were only such a dream. By this time all the caissons
    of power had been turned inside out anyway; it was considered correct to despise it
    and rightly so, but how often can one shamble
    back to the vegetable gunk and still retain at least a superficial appearance of contrition?
    As often as the clock seems to say I love you and boulders
    turn in their sleep and sigh and the cat is forever running away. It took
    two weeks to lead up to this. The stores are quiet now.
    I say lie down in it. I already asked Santa about it.
    And then, you see, it became part of our cultural history. We can’t ignore it
    even though we’d like to, it’s so mild and hurtless. And you thought
    you had it bad, or good. With as many associations as that
    to keep thumbing through, one winks at the legal filigrane that penetrates every
    page of the mouldering sheaf down to the last one, like a spike
    through a door. Somebody dust these ashes off, open
    the curtains, get a little light on the subject: the subject
    going off on its own again. Yes but if home were only light
    sliding down darkened windows in rivulets, inhabiting their
    concavities and generally adapting itself to the contours of what is already there,
    one could understand that,
    lie back on the stiff daybed shading one’s eyes from
    omnipresent bleary dawn that acts as an uncle’s remonstrance: do this
    not for me or for yourself but for your mother the way an empty circle
    of daisies seeks to promote plausibility and is simultaneously too distraught
    and ashamed to articulate the siren call crisply and sinks, it too,
    into the foam of reliably not taking itself seriously. I wish you well darling always
    especially days when the gray pain lifts for a moment like fog trapped under
    a layer of warmer air, then sags definitively not knowing what to do
    with itself or about anything. Days when the pointed freshness of forests
    above the snowline
    can consider itself numb, when the friendly gurgling of rills talks
    back and one listens but never heeds
    that desire for perfectability. Hey, it was here only a moment ago
    I think or somebody misled me, as sometimes happens, yet with as many
    associations as that some of it is bound to come down, to crumble, to be reduced
    to a vexing powder but natural like dust, and that
    within all our lifetimes. Local businessmen bristled. New painless
    methods were introduced but somehow made it all thick and rubbery, an unwanted anthem.
    No one said it. Care was off and running, the divorce courts
    overflowing for once, and no one was going to take issue, dispute the power vacuum
    that was walking around shaking hands, acting for all the world like a candidate.
    But you feel it don’t you? How come nobody
    has anything nice
    to say, I mean you striped ball, even for a testimonial dinner on a commercial, then they all
    run back, must have been a mistake. Yes, we have it here.
    Anyway, where are they? I am violently opposed to the little pieces
    of the puzzle getting in on the act; slobbering, as it were,
    any more than I can see Little Red Riding Hood climbing Mt. McKinley.
    But as for the horror of it—we are, look, all of us, undisciplined so
    when it’s time to take the kids somewhere or subvert the boss’s ego the light
    goes out of us for an instant. Oh I know we can patch it up, always successfully,
    later. But out of the fine deposit of the encounter there is surely something
    that is required reading, though seldom in focus. Good gravy, it
    gives me the creeps just telling you about it. And after we had sunbathed
    the mist was on time,