Quite commonplace all told

Back at it where the waters swell and recede


Isn’t this again the same forgotten landscape that only recurs in dreams?
Always the same peculiarities on the expanse outlaid before you
The water at your left the fields and birches busy rambling on your right
And at the end the low solid weir and the dusty abandoned barracks.

Isn’t it maybe the traumatic paradise you were once told
A ticket had been already secured for you to easily reach and get in?

As an mere child chased from home great sinner that you must’ve been
A mere child not to death expeditiously exiled but young and good
Pledging never to turn back bent on perduring bound for planetary glory.

And suddenly the desolate void dark untried summer night
Where after the joyful sunny anabasis no victory comes
At the silent abrupt last stop where apocatastic instead you grow a tail
And your feline eyes scrutate then those cheating ways
That must regardless carry you home where at last from so far
Already you surmise at the balcony the eager presence of your mother
Who soon shall secretly shield you from the trite ogre’s hairy rage.

And then nothing learned a few months after ejected once more
That time in a definitive way for he the angry godly one
Never never he shouts don’t want to see you anymore
Don’t you ever dare come back again.

Winter frozen night where you can’t stop trailing along
Else you’ll turn into a petrified scarecrow at a scrawny corner
For the abstracted homeless workers traipsing from fire to fire
Maybe mistaking you for some other lousy sacred image
To fleetingly doff their pungent moth-harried woolen headgear.

After dawn endure still a bit and wait not far from your grandmother’s
That the gruff males from the house depart to their morning rackets
And then knock on and slink in and she’s in a tizzy right away
And there’s her bed still warm and how deep and how long your sleep becomes!

Now there it is yes quite commonplace all told the landscape
The curious landscape the strange paradise that suddenly
Winds up on the low weir and the ruined deserted barracks.

Mother of Jove even her won’t easily convince her resentful son
Your all-powerful hell-decreeing father who nevertheless swears
Even you present shan’t ever see nor hear you or from you ever again.

You’ve become the sneaky phantom haunting the same oneiric landscape
Where the water at your left progressively over the trail licks the fields
And the golden throne where the bulbous hirsute god hatefully sits
Seems ever so slowly but surely to be getting washed away
To be sooner than later slurped up by the hungry sea
Or else crookedly carried over the well-cemented end barrier
At the other side of which dangerously the new children play ball above
On the gritty terraces of the old crumbling empty meaningless buildings
No longer gray but ever gloomier darkening deeper and deeper.

(boy in yellow)

Comes a boy dressed in lemon yellow (why?)
A friend of my son (dressed in orange)
(Are they a couple of fruits, do you think?)
And the reason is he’s eager to decipher
And convert into his own tongue
One of my solid object-poems
One of those kept (in the shape of an unscrambled puzzle)
In one of those other nondescript boxes over there
(Were he not a friend of my son’s would he even had ever heard about them?)
Well let’s see
Does he know that the ultimate sense of that object-poem can only be extricated by one or several dreams dreamt by the decipherer?
And this only after two or three weeks during which the brain has been more or less able to digest it?
Digest (that is grasp intellectually) most (or better still all) of its insinuations?
The lemon seems in awe at my ominous words
And yet how meekly accepts the “challenge” (his word humbly)
So one adds the following
That here’s the box
That he’s free to use his own time to do whatever he wants with it (his time) (not the box)
That the box one expects to get it back with all the pieces yet there
And...
That under no circumstances will one’s help be (ok?) forthcoming.