Classic Poem

Massive stone.
A public grey building

Shadowy applicants
mill around
slowly slowly
he among them
no one speaks
or looks

The nameless plodders,
the inner downtrodden
. . . O patient ones!
in the shadow
of the labor market:
figures smudged in grey
charcoal like men
on a bread line,
I as drab and sodden as the others
It was not possible to say
whether the hysteria I felt
was in me or in that dense time
when I was starting out as a young man,
the necessity to make a living
the cement shaft of my backbone.

A blotted word was not
so indistinct as he.
The air
mucous and dispirited.
How hard it was to tell
time from foreboding,
they were both so heavy
and inert.
I recognized
the grave masque:
Civil Servant in His Cubicle,
twelve paces from his desk
to the public window;
answer question;
hand out form;
peruse
in the slow measure
of a document
and crawl
twelve paces back
How can I describe
who I was there?

The remote figure is oblivious,
waits on others
Anger then
like water
warming up
and starting to stir
over a burner
threw a javelin
from the eye.

“Now look here!
I demand!
no sound

Five mules of weight

“I must!”

The clerk then disappears
altogether, like an electric
current suddenly dead,
and I awoke,
its dim buzzing still in me

What is the point?
Next time I'm lying on my back,
my sinuses clogging up
and far inside my head
as in a swelling
one nerve vibrates,
unable to transmit its impulse,
I must remember to turn over.
I'd like another chance
Just once I'd like to be
able to make it
in this chicken-shit theater.
But if I'm always going to be
afloat on a becalmed sea
like the ancient mariner,
to hell with it.
I'll stick to the earth's atmosphere
where it is “wondrous clear
and exhilerating” and I can
take my steel out
and make me visible.