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.