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PHILOSOPHICAL CONSEQUENCES OF AN ORDINARY DAY
By Quentin Smith
Sonority moves across the ceiling
A voice seeps ghostlike from the floorboards
A pallid film-strip of clouds unravels through the window.
Over the termites’ eternal holes blinds are uselessly drawn.
A lamp bulb burns without mercy near the ceiling.
A poet’s hand writes lines of ennui on monotonous pages.
Over the roof there is a blind, wounded and bandaged day
That limps, staggers, crawls and then falls on and on.
This profanation of the strange poet’s dreams
Will happen over and over again until he dies languorously
And numbed after years of these days.
Optimism will say something hidden or manifest in
this day’s events is a meaning, if there is meaning.
At all. But the poet’s quest cannot detect it.
If his hand writing obdurately on the paper,
Never reaches the meaning, but traverses
a finite distance on an infinite line,
then what is the use of writing or,
indeed, of doing anything at all?
The poet views seeming humans from his one window
Semblant humans have mistaken their weblike dreams for reality,
And the poet views still other semblances who sleepwalk through unseen days
And convince each other that this is what is called “being awake”.
But the poet always redescends from his always unsatisfactory lines,
dreamlessly and really awake, and resolves again and again
to allow himself to think and experience anything at all.
But after all of this is revealed and everything done,
Does it really matter? Dream or no dream, asleep or awake,
He will be dead in hours, months, or flashed-by decades from now.
A long hour, or a decade shorter than a memory, what’s the difference?
When deceased, he knows these seemingly urgent concerns will matter
Not even to the thousand fold dead maggots
Who once ate excitedly his bloated corpse to the bone.
Now the philosopher asks: If this concern
About meaninglessness really matters to him,
Then should he care about nothing at all?
If so, then it is Nothing that is the meaning of his Being.
He should live writing Nothing on no paper
In the void of his roomlessness,
And this would be the only lack of sadness
That is not distant from his unmarked darkness.
Written 2002 |