a Cloud of Unknowing

Oh world, oh half dead attempt to function
          on a calculated misdemeanor that only breeds
          bloodshed and mistrust.
Oh dewy eyed lady of historical misunderstanding,
          lying between rough hewn sheets stained
          with political excrement and non sexual fluidity.
Where be the creative principle, where hath gone
          the gentle flickering in the heart, or did
          the human heart ever really flicker?
Oh I age, I moan upon these lined pages,
          my pen resembling an autistic teardrop,
          locked up inside, voice muted by an avalanche
          of centuries old pain.
So many vicious gods given birth to
          from the hungry loins of the economic whore,
          so many prophets and poets stoned to death
          by the side of the road lined by strip malls
          and elegies of starvation.
I look out across the uncosmic horizon
          and see the charred bodies of third world children,
          see the laughter of hydrogen and napalm
          and the hideous metallic gargoyle
          of industrialized weaponry.
I see the smog smothering up cities, mountainsides
          and once pristine waters.
I see my own grandchildren asleep in their innocence
          and I weep into the nightmare of their future.
And the borders they grow like a uniformed wall
          of mad mushrooms . . . borders of the mind,
          borders of the heart, borders of the soul . . .
          all created by an insane rush to judgement
          caused by individualization and the ego driven
          putrid power of testosterone.
Oh I have walked down Bleaker Street with the oldest
          man in the world and I have seen the results
          of the wrong side of the curtain where
          the illusionary waltz just goes on and on and on.
I have witness the cruel rape of the human spirit
          from the darkest medieval basement
          to the highest tower of metal and glass
          in the New Babylon.
I have heard the symphonic wail inside European
          state rooms of opulence, have heard
          the blue tinted groan of the auction block,
          the inhuman pestilence of cotton fields
          locust infested.
I have felt the eruption in the bowels of the Middle East,
          have felt the tormenting wound of aids
          spreading like a wild grass fire upon the plains
          of Africa.
I have smelt the burning flesh of Nagasaki and Saigon,
          the haze of gun smoke and the decaying bodies
          at Wounded Knee and Auschwitz.
So world, I will not be desensitized by the numbing           
          metronome of your persistent dull throb . . .
          instead I will climb back into the Buddha’s palm
          and sit calmly and watch you float by
          like a cloud

        of unknowing.