STAGE POETRY COMPANY

Morning Star

The Persian rug fades far into the corners of dusk
To the edged of the inverted stariway,
And from its cellar the darkness crawls, as it
Crawls defining the table where I write.

The promises recovered in dawn,
A memory of fresh snow, bells on
My heels, the first steps, a chariot.

A jacket of roses lies across the naked chair.
My finger traces a thought along the border
Of a tapestry; a single figures awaits command,
In the lonely borders of descending heavens.

Some Etrusan trumpt calls--
The poor devil has never slept
For life, it seems, is a waking dream.

He parks in the car in the bare lot
Near the corner below the pencilled moon,
And stiffly, hearing the gravel talk,
Follows the walkway into the sun.

April and the Sacred River

The river that divides the city’s heart
Is lined with spectators--
Children in rags,
Women in bonnets,
And the catalogue of time goes by us
In its various and precise history.

Now it is April, not a moment in time
But time itself, immutable;
A burlesque face,
An immovable body
Gone to a source having once lived, now
From the wooden skiff having us singing,
Drowning like memory.

In the background stands the imperfect city
Once hoisted from humanity’s shoulders
By winter’s perfect, reticent light.
Known of no triangle whose apex is sky.

Now the boatswain has red eyes,
His dog heaves the river’s slumber.
Death assumes no veil but simplicity,
Waters colored by myriad eyes.
Sing, sway, they long to be forgotten.
Remember the life they long to sing.

The child breaks the frayed rope,
Escaping the forearm of a crowd,
Runs the angle to the muddy shore
And finds it sand, finds them all again
Letting the years sift through their hands.

The dream continues on the beach,
Where the wind is kneeling.
So comes the accolade . . .
The child runs with heavy legs,
His heart sinks with the bay,
Arriving only one life too late,
On the last stetch of land,
To shield his eyes,
At the sea’s navel.
To believe
In a ship consumed in waves of sight.

The dream has continued, the people resume.
Recognition, and time, like an encore, passes.

Spreading the map of seasons full size
My fingers like pins know internal journeys.
And it is true what the mind tells you,
You have been everywhere as a child.
We built a wooden ship in the backyard,
Layed it with straplings, stood on the keel.
And the rain erased it one afternoon.

The neighors stood still as harbor lights,
And the day moved around them, clumsily,
Until they went down to the river with its gowns.
And April carried even paper boats
To their source, an outstretched hand--
When water was a miracle, a child in rags
Saw suns in tiny mirrors of sand.

Time would never dissolve the faces
That line the shore, like it dissolves itself.
Water is immune to change. A child
Runs to see the year break his stride,
And April is a prayer again.

Pianoforte

His fingers dare not touch, so
Gentle is this night, so
Terrible would be soft light.
He dare not speak for fear of
Shattering sound like ice,
In the mercy of light.
Because he is not alone, he lives
To watch himself--
Opening the glass, peering into the
Depth of cities, souls, or their mirrors.

Sounds drop like icicles and disappear
Into the depths of infinite ponds.
His eye’s angle penetrates
The folds or the ripples of sounds
On curtains opened faraway,
Letting the night onto a balcony
Where her image fades, her
Steps resounding singily, rising
On the stairway like piano keys.

Lines to a Prophet

You have already heard; why do you stare
At the slammed garden gate?
At the chipped red rail, at the
Last wisp of sky?

You decided; head bowed, knuckles firm
On the ancient table,
In the assumed shroud, as she
Turned from the porcelain stove.

Winter knocks gently on the pane.
There was storm already in your head,
As you gathered miles in a glance,
Saw them running with sleigh dogs--
Turned down your collar on chance.

There is pity in nature. Why else would
Snow hold so fast, in diverse worlds?

But walk halfway round the room,
You have already turned your back.

Twilight and Prokofieff

An arch stroke; a slash across the human
Sky, or a thought preserved, like the end
Of day, and then sprung loose.
I might have glanced at you, ironing a shirt
In the broad day; but I am already given over
To night, loose.

An arch stroke, a master's stroke,
A glance sideways in the day, the
Clatter of a knife on my plate, a violin!
Only now do I hear how mad is the young
Lady, playing in the parlor, on the black keys.

A glance sideways across the evening sky
And half my face is gone to a thin reflection
On the dusty window.

This suppliant is wit herself
Come at last through the spaces
In the twilight.

A cat sleeps near the radiator.
Is this existence, or my death,
Laid away in some warehouse in the sky?
A mellow note, a cello, a picasso.
The strictly human.
Evening will wind toward
Its conclusion, and following like a child

I will go with it.

Scene from the Life of a Dedicated Mortal

The action in here is short, but so unheralded
You're liable to miss it anyway, like the blase
Listener to the true news reports of your friends;
When bigger fare, stories fat and familiar, hog
The attention and keep you tuned to all society,
One practically forgets about the human wiseguy
Resident in the soul, who is wandering here freely.
Someday you will be quiet, and admit the miracles
That forced life upon you. And when the audience
Wanting to hear about your life struggles gets
Some time . . . you'll make a preface, just like I
Do here. God took a deep breath,
Before amazing us.

I was marching, or lolligagging, on the sidewalk
Back from the corner grocery, with a plastic bag,
Coming under the streetlamps growing brighter down
The block, toward my house, pretty unsettled,
Thinking furiously, like life were a jigsaw puzzle . . .
I was the missing piece, getting back in sync, I
Had some supplies to make the evening complete.
Who knows what I was thinking about, it should
Have been simple enough, walking back down the street
From the store, you'd think I'd done this a thousand
Times, there was no issue in it. Hardly part of a
Story, then, I kept putting my feet in motion, and
When the bag grew heavy, I switched to the other hand.
Still, amphitheaters in the heavens, marked my
Progress on this night in history,
I knew . . . implicitly.

That's pure vanity, which is admissible, I'd say
Particularly in this neighborhood, where the houses
Tend to grow dark, a little after eight thirty, and
People, from all reports, are watching the television
And growing mighty inward and disrespectful . . .
Like the next day would provide ancient sunlight.
I was just walking down the sidewalk with a bag of
Groceries at night, hardly with an argument that I
Was even alive, a dedicated mortal,
Not trying anything.

Suddenly--well, not really suddenly--but looming
Upward, in my path, I caught the fact that there
Was this large grey obstacle, in the shape of a van,
Right in my path. Somebody had parked this van
In a driveway, and I thought, I've seen this before,
This is typical, this grey van blocking the sidewalk,
I guess I'm supposed to interrupt my thoughts and
The pleasant, sort of pleasant, free wheeling foot
Motion I've established, since the traffic light
And the store, and all episodes gone entirely by,
And have to swerve around this obstacle van, while
Not mentioning it ever, to anybody. Jesus, life is
Full of little adjustments! I was growing tired
And out of breath from talking to myself so much,
Like nobody but God heard
All my . . . articulations.

I was kind of floating in these preliminary
Observations, the small duty had me fascinated.
And then I thought, oh why do I conform so often
And with such automatic diligence, to every grey van
Presenting itself so suddenly? Hell, I could walk
Right through it, if I enacted the moment of belief;
If I really needed to, I could do any thing I pleased!
I was still a good ten paces from the blockading
Grey van--very grey was this van, right in my path-
And the idea occurred to me to just walk through it,
Bag of groceries and all, all my past life intact.
It was not even a matter of concentration, but it
Was simple belief, I had reality by the throat, if
Reality was this night street, or this the challenge.
That grey van is not an obstacle, I thought. Okay,
Right in this time, for the hell of it,
I walk through it.

As I got within a mere second of enacting this
Miracle (and hearing the transcendental applause),
Which I never doubted I could perform, though no one
Would see me do it, no one in the neighborhood of
Course, would see me walk through the van unscathed,
Or the van unscathed, actually nothing interrupted
Maybe . . . as I got to the very time of decision here,
Well, I swerved to the left and went around it, so
Clumsily I thought I might get injured. And I was
Protecting the bag of groceries from knocking into
The fender of this stubborn reality I had admitted
Without really wanting to, acting out the scenario
Of a man sort of silently dealing with things he
Runs into, anyway, or in spite of his eternal soul,
His previous dealings with angels and spirits and
Promises of retribution for any sufferings in this
Life, his connection to God, his position established
On high, before he got to
Seek out his mortality . . .

So with this kind of blind adherence, I swerved
In the available direction, off balance and no more
Thinking clearly, to get immediately as a present,
I mean a token, for my diligent behavior, I mean
In thus conforming to ordinary existence, like I
Never had a thought otherwise, I was forthwith, I
Mean without delay stepping broadside in a puddle--
Puddle like all puddles you get off the path of
Any nonchalant walk, like you weren't watching out!
And I was losing my grip on the grocery bag, too,
Stumbling back onto the sidewalk with a soaked foot,
On the far side now of the van, the van now in
History! Life, I thought, are
You there to amuse me?

I was clutching the bag, and desperate to just
Continue. I was very deep in thought, about my
Actions I guess, what actions I took or didn't, my
Thoughts about my actions, feeling still like a hero.
The trial of my near miraculous pass-through of the
Grey van consumed me the entire rest of the journey,
Several hundred yards, past many houses, to my house--
Which I always feel it's extraordinary to recognize,
Like I came back from ages, from aeons, to come inside.

I found the porchsteps, and the door like untried
By any mortal. I was looking to get home at last,
And well, I simply went inside. Ah, everything still
Existed as I remembered it. In fact I had brought
The groceries, and it was with fervent sentiment
I set the trophy down, cast my keys into the dish
By the telephone, and greeted my kids and my wife,
Suppressing for the moment all
Combat in that war outside!

I was thinking, well it's really most incredible, of
All things in heaven and earth, to be human and survive
For an hour, than anything that one can imagine. Ah,
How did I get here? What a saga of joy and confusion!
By avoiding all impulse for supernatural action, I
Say we survive, outflanking the gods, outmaneuvering
All generations which have gone from here since,
On an instinct which the gods could not manage,
Survivors in the most unusual of experiments. Yes,

This path down the sidewalk, so totally obscure,
Has led me here, to where I tell of true adventure
In the world. Signposts in the neighborhood, the
Streetlights so incidental in the universe at large,
All seem to proclaim the news now . . . no gods, but
Only dedicated mortals, walk in these nights where
Life is provided in the character of an opportunity.

Edward Williams

(7) The Morning Star

"The Red Dawn" Douglas Lazarus . . . Colored pencil

You are somewhere else in the city, lost,
Alive, and there is no description
In which you exist, busy and transcendent.
Nothing can cover this large setting,
No panoramic view from an uptown window,
Containing us both, our real acquaintance.
No one isolate--or narrate--our meeting,
Beyond the occasion of a perfect chance,
Talking in the rapid air on the street--
For when I speak, then you are here.

Already our knowledge is manifold and vast;
Only, laughingly, everything about myself
Is built on prophecy, doomed to suspense,
Desire experience in a circle of memory,
While you, and the rest of the people
(Not an infinity, but a simple multitude,
Hardly a populace, to fill the theater,
Just a personal network which I can gather
On a optimistic weekend, for a picnic
On the bluff overlooking the city, or a
Solstice, mid-afternoon, in the kitchen),
You, and they, are alive, busy, somewhere
Else in the city, real voices in the mind,
Thriving in remoteness. And it easy
To fail, and fail again, fail privately
In the night to establish anything . . .

I conjure the fatal scene, the blind pass--
With sealed lips, he hands you the book
Of night, the book of the false witness.
You sit, in the open room, at the table.
He parks his car in the bare lot,
At the corner below the penciled moon,
And swiftly, hearing the gravel talk,
Follows the walkway into the sun--the sun
That spills forth in his headlong path
Buildings and people . . .
The morning star, across from the sun,
Is lingering still in the absent sky.
He is going nowhere, but wandering around.

How long has he been wandering around?
Longer than it could possibly take to find
Anything in the imagination;
Deep in his coats, ponderous and abstract,
Among the happy idiots, who contradict him!
The world cannot be found, like this,
It must be saved, by fatal demonstration;
And he leaves a trail of judgements behind
Him, grounded, which leap into reality.

You are somewhere among these facts,
Assembled--it is wonderful to doubt the
Presence of things--it happens to someone,
At lunch, in the car, on the elevator,
And when life becomes a palpable dreams,
He barely recalls how he came here at all.

And you look, and you see absolute promise,
A silhouette to watch the morning star.

When he is called to turn and wonder
At the city drifting in the air.
Difficult words, beautiful to recall,
Famous thoughts
Thoughts which pass in the atmosphere.

The sunlight is totally given away,
Fainting in the sky on a summer day,
Absorbed by the pavement, pink and grey;
And the moonlight is aptly converted to use
In a thousand diverting while spectacles;
The whole city is under a reading lamp,
While dawn, outside, is drenching the fields.
These are visible lives, ideal people,
Who should be expertly portrayed--
Linked to one another only in scenes
By secondary lighting and choice fixtures,
While outside whole, customary crowds
Drift without design along the empty lanes.

"Pipes of Dawn" . . . Sidney Lazarus

--------------- THE END -----------------

Edward Williams

REALITY, a poem in 7 parts
posts begin on July 8th, 2007

(6) A Plural Heaven

He is closing the door, against the city.
Another nice barricade is up;
He advances toward the crowded living room.
Several guests, now, have left, and the
Others have relaxed--he is sliding
Into a forum, or a world of people;
Standing, or talking, he is in the open,
Or between rooms with a tray of drinks;
He is answering a specific complaint,
Then he finds, while speaking, whole
Worlds of space to continue thinking,
As a host to similar voices and pleas
In another scene or composition
When, toppled among the furniture and drapes,
He argues the privilege of being alone.
He is setting himself an impossible task--
Grabbing the back of an armchair,
In flight; replying, with customary
Tact. Whole crowds are gathering
Under storm clouds in the street.
He is leaning way back, and would venture
To guess what someone is thinking--

I think I will publish
This history of thought, its reiteration
Is infinite and amusing; I am only
Sitting by the charming, affluent light
Among the friendly party of souls
To discuss an individual death--
What it was, the floating universe,
Before my life,
What it could be, the abandoned life
A couple of days past my private death,
An absence echoing in the city and field.

Again, straightening his cuffs, he must
Apologize to the guests for having fun;
He is trifling with their lives . . .

Death, is a large and serious personality,
Inscrutable, wearing a mask of stone,
A bad joke among a group of friends,
An idea unfailing, always the same,
Severe, expressionless in all weather
Like an alabaster soldier in the park,
A giant figure planted against the sun.
Death is behind all tragedy, it is plain,
Topical, changeable in form, it is with
You in a step, like a giant, in the park;
Deep in the mind it dreams of a crude
And natural summons, it is staying around.
Death is a necessity for thought, it is
Nothing at all, and growing wild.

It is not that we, uniformly crippled,
Cannot sketch the course of this story,
Or attach a terrible significance, here,
To the wind rushing in the blind alley,
Or to the black roses, sheltered, there,
In transparent vases on the windowsill,
Or painted, with consummate skill, on
A canvas, framed, hung upon the wall--
Nor that anything lies beyond the grasp
Or such a society, such happy decadence;

But that everything, lavish, intended,
Is here already, in this locality--
All the mystery, our full attendance,
The entire future of speculation.
There are spectacles lying in waste,
A virtual city, with its fated monuments,
Structures blasted out of sunlight,
Antiquity in the colored rust, in the air,
Machines that carry materials here--
Things more fantastic than the complex spirit
(What is more doubtful than this rude stone?)
Reality in question everywhere--
His doubting thoughts, passing in bald
Mimicry on the assembled faces, his
Dancing hands, requiring real participation,
Whilst he is proposing a heaven on earth.

I was singing in the yard, I had
A whole imagined time to grasp, before
Me, a terrain, a solid mystery
Behind me, I had, flatly, no origin--
First, an ecstatic cause, then a lifetime
Of beauty and distraction
In which to encounter a sham mortality.
You are a baby in such matters, I remember
Life, it springs without a premise,
A great religion lies proven in the grass.
It is controversial to be in the world,
And youth, at first attained in years,
As the summit of a first chronology,
Is permanent, now, in the mind--

Memory of Childhood . . . Doug Lazarus

Memory is close, closer than life was
In that yard; I pause, and suddenly the storm
Is upon me, in a rush--hasn’t it always been
Like this, just looking around; like now,
When we are gathered here in a scene,
Entertained, in our mutual disbelief?
I am inspired to tell
You comedy of my long privacy,
The ridiculous deaths suffered alone,
In roadside woods, in underground cities,
How I stood up, confused, or laughing,
Walked into the old living room, renewed.

It is detail the nervous man is wanting,
Lest he dwell, fatally, in a world of ideas.
Shall I jump, struck, knock down the statuettes;
Or succumb most slowly to a disease?
Will this define, at last, that circle
Of family, dead, dying, and living, that
Famous crowd of spectacular friends--
No long encountered
On apartment house stairways (I see them
Walking, on future errands, easily past);
No temperance, finally, in their references
To this unfortunate early victim,
Already while strolling in the springtime
Graveyard, so many brave survivors
In a strange reality . . .

And shall I forgo, entirely, the figure
Of myself, calmly watching it?
Isn’t this myself, the
Soul of long observation, in this hour?
How, having watching so much, could I miss
The very scene so often considered--
One is tempted to say there isn’t anything
For which I am so well-equipped,
As a hero, than to die a specific death . . .

There is great safety in this awareness,
The fertile and absurd creature of life
Abounds in gentle reasoning.
He is constrained in eternal victory,
The author of innumerable scenes,
Shattered in the act of planting his hands
Upon a disappearing face. Are you dying?
He asks. Of a paradoxical wonder?
Half the people he has set to mourning,
To anticipate a slow and terrible dawning
Of an ancient wording upon the lips,

Revelation upon revelation, mystery growing
Worse--because death cannot be imagined,
It is is dull, implacable, it lacks occasion,
It does not exist. It is wonderless, a common
Ruffian, it is does not complete what is
Incomplete, like life!, whose causes are
Absolutely gone, erased forever, laying
Elsewhere--grandly. And nature has become
A secondary thing to this ecstatic strangeness--
A picture book compared with bright language.
I remember life--it is a plural heaven.

Dance of the Survivors . . . . . . Doug Lazarus

Why do I, as I say, know exactly what
I am talking about?
And why do you, who are in the room?
We had an idea of life, it was a plural heaven,
Because the question was not only mine.

Very few can die, and create a vacuum;
Few can escape, be the subject of important
Telegrams, cause a shuddering void
At a dinner party, making you think
They long to live a few days further,
Leaving things undone
That never will be done--
A trellis in the yard, a book upon the table,
Left to the wind and wandering children,
A point in a pleasurable thesis unpinned.

For most begin, long years before, asking
For help in a torture of the self,
A self uncreated without that consent,
And fade away through multiple arrangements,
Complicity, and betrayal, and are
Literally forgotten, wasted in the mind.

Rare is the man growing gladly weaker
In an armchair in the sun, or the warrior
Struck down on a foreign border, with
A dispatch behind him, the globe going
On past his thunderous fall on the forest
Floor . . . and in the city, I know,
They are lingering, in the hospitals.

Solitude is what is finally a lie,
Crippling the neighbors, the guests
At the banquet, those tamely and rationally
Talking of life. We have no speech
For the grim dialogue, but can only supply
A mockery of looks, outrage and denial,
For the desperate man of silent years
To take, indecorously, to the end,
Crashing or slipping,
The world without entirely rejected and
Defeated in his aging subjectivity.

And by then, the commodious thinking
Goes, who needs them--or anyone--anyway?
A storm will come up, from cursed heavens,
And carry me away. Who can say I cared?

How many have died like that! Many times?
(This is the beginning of our hilarity.)
How many rank suicides are among us?
You see them, ashamed, coming back in the light.
Escorting them to the door, you hear
Their ambiguous footfall upon the stair--
Who was that man? Ah, here he is again!

He is in the middle of a conversation,
Several people are expected to arrive;
He is bowed in thought, staring at the carpet,
Automatically charmed; he is rising to
A pitch of feverish attention; he keeps
Learning, again, the first thing learned
In a controversial presence. There is

Nowhere for the wind to fly, mystery
Among the roses, sheltered by the window;
You have that, don’t you, in your eyes?

Edward Williams

"Night Performers"

NIGHT PERFORMERS Sidney Lazarus (1955) Colored Pencil

(5) The Experience of the Street

You are caught, in a moment, crossing
The room or the street, wondering
About place, you are landing on your
Feet, the memory of life is sudden
Enchantment, when shafts of light fly
Back toward the open sky, drawn back
Through the rough geometry of the windows.
You have some idea of the sun, pulling up
To a stop in its running course, some idea
Of the night, flooding in from the shadows
Crossing your path-- This must be a
Hallmark in time, such memories of life,
Of light, flying down the open street,
Past dangerous alleys . . .

These ideas are mixed, irretrievably,
In burned spots on the oak paneling,
On the lampshade arched above the
Aged book, swirling, as you take a
Consummate glance at the world . . .

Should I begin, tamely and rationally
Again, to list for you the natural rumors
That plague and besiege our poor city--?
We are settling down for another evening
With everything once again at hand;
I am mindful of your simple inquiry.
I would introduce torrential affections,
Violent weather into our painted rooms,
Purple designs mottled on the lampshade,
Rough hands overturning the china . . .
And outside, too, a tremendous chaos,
Cuffed and collared shadows running at you.
Can I practice again this conscious amusement?

When you walk you see the ordering
Of the towers, the algebra of the lights--
You would suffer an exquisite pleasure
In such an open life;
Far too many topics or attractions
Commingling in the mind of an attentive
Listener--high comedy in the thought
Of the printed matter, problems, danger,
The population swarming upon the ground,
The difficulty of the traffic at dawn--
Mere coercions of will,
Resulting in so much literal junk,
Like overturned treasures in the river,
Clocks and statuettes on the mantle,
Poetry in the moment of things observed.

You have collected much arcane debris,
All the images alive in the clashing city.

My famous visit, later, to the newsstand
At the corner trapped by the weather,
Is all destined-- What destiny finds
Is the rudiments of an idyll, workers
Shouting to one another, newsprint
In bundles, thrown from passing trucks . . .

The dawn will touch the minor scaffolding--
The city is hardly there at all, when your
Footsteps alight on the grey and pink
Pavement. Then, walking, the night begins.
Who can question the greatness of the setting?
You can walk all night, laden with suitcases,
And never find an exit;
You rest at the corner, trapped by the weather.
Knowledge is sad--
Ruined men sit in the parks all night,
In the green shadows, by ineffectual lamps.

I am going to explain the purpose of reading,
Or the experience of the street.
It is to implant specific dangers--
Serious thoughts, which do not cohere;
It is an armament against an empty fear.

Eventually I am sent, in naive wanderings,
To the cheap food shop, or coffee stand
That never closes (that is eternally closed
To my view of my contemplation, while some
One of the owners is always sweeping
The aisles or corners), directly behind
The awesome printing factory, in the lost
Center of the city--
But fronting for the public walker
(Who is a common joke on the interior)
The pearled and grimy avenue
Rearing and fading
According to a thousand seasons that make
A calendar impossible in this region,
So that I can never enter, at my leisure,
But am caught, in sudden weather, below
The fading shopsign, in the fugitive breeze.

It is better-advisable--to find the side door,
Where the workers themselves
Enter and leave from the printing factory
Night and day; they go in and out,
They are putting away tremendous sandwiches,
And equal rounds and coffee and beer
Which are made here in limitless quantities,
Flowing from tubs. The deliveries are coming in
Quite directly to the kitchen, the kitchen
Help there is versed in a kind of swearing,
Which the customers are trading--trafficking
In polite talk. The exit light,
Beyond the dancing television and smoke
Settling over the pool tables, is blinking;
And everyone is here, no one is staying;
It is the middle of the night--

These are the other men,
Whom I am required to misunderstand, to
Whom it is mere vanity to speak.
They are non-existent, between us, you know,
Hardly a gesture of pity could dislodge
Them from their seats.
The lighting is bad here, the murals on
The walls are vague, like mythologies--
Representing an age of brutish leisure.

Never has firelight greased the flesh
Of men so rudely awake, stained with ink
Amid the childishly whirring machines,
Interested, solely, in meat, cook with
Iron tongs upon a beastly fire
Until it is rubber, like the rubber belts
From which they hand, over the machines
Until in a moment of great surprise
Distant whistles release them to another errand.
Quick exits are made,
And blue vans cruise the dawn.

And hardly have I returned to sleep,
When suddenly the dawn in happening.

To think of a language as severe
As the clanging hello, the doubled fist;
This drawing of nature is easy, and
False-- I had a mission to complete;
I went outside, and the city was unfinished.

This was a kind of nature, dreaming itself.
Nature never likes the sidling intellect,
It is busy blasting holes in the sand,
Sliding vaulting doors in mountains of rubble,
Burying the tiny communities.
The workers sit, exhausted, in the street.

These are the other men! What a
Fearsome lot, with what unwieldy toys.
It is hard to defeat the cowardice of
Our poetry, its simpering tones, its
Universal empathy. It’s granting to
Mere colossus of form, lost intensities.

Are you reading this? The city was built
At night, the city is being built, it is
Night when you walk with large steps
Like an architect through the
Rough geometry of the air,
Avoiding the black holes in the ground,
The ladders that hold aloft high towers
That disappear in a sharpened gaze
To implume the night with glittering dust.

It is better to buy, hurriedly from stalls,
Food, clothes, random furnishings,
Than die, subtle, in the electric light
Advertised the magazine swimming overhead.

Step, once again, aside to assert
A large window in a three story dwelling--
A figure at first too boldly outlined,
Come to dwell within the idle shadows;
It is these shadows you must accept--
The city is absolute farce of shadows.

Jump, at the sight of the streetlamp
And its narrow definitions,
hurriedly, to buy a pack of cigarettes
In the incredible world.

Edward Williams