World Affairs from the Sidewalks of Life
-Erik Rittenberry
All of us, thrown into the slaughterhouse
of history, thrown into a world
of assassinated Caesars
and crucified Christs,
into a woeful world
of useless wars and mayhem, a
world one madman away
from nuclear annihilation,
a world of technocratic schemers
and censored truthtellers, a world
where cancer eats the flesh,
inflation eats the earnings,
and progress eats the soul.
I emerge from a dingy dive bar
on E 4th Street and sit on a
graffiti-covered bench in the sun
to watch the frantic folks babble on phones
and walk with an unholy detachment
on the sidewalks of an evanescent
empire.
Everything is hectic and zooming by,
fast fast fast,
the great symphony of modernity —
cheap amusements, diversions, billboards of
smiling stooges, steel and cement and wifi,
guns and knives and needles,
conmen, thieves, and murderers,
fat wallets placed in the back pockets
of adderall-souled bigshots looking for the kill…
but hey, I just sit here half-drunk in the
golden afternoon and admire the girls
because the world is ugly
and they’re still pretty in their rustling skirts,
and their lavender smiles make me smile
as they stroll by my saluting eyes.
O America,
what have you done to your
children, these callous cogs
in a relentless wheel,
these nervous news-watchers,
these swollen toads of bitterness
and anxiety that wage war on
their own lives.
This once beautiful land of Whitman
and Emerson now reeks of mediocrity
and madness.
I say let us burn burn burn
the hollow creeds and the
bureaucratic yoke of this
waiver signing society, and let us
revive the Promethean fire
of the dead poets who have more
to offer us than any of these
wretched talking heads with a
vested interest in keeping you and I
“adjusted” to the soulless algorithm
of the status quo.
Let us burn burn burn
the headlines of treachery
and the flimsy thrones of all these
pallid-hearted politicians, and
let us do away with the life-negating
dogmas and all the
stupidity
corruption
greed
war
murder
and all the childish delusions
that sustain the idiotic inanities
of a belligerent world.
Luckily, my friends, the ravens
still flutter in the demented wind
somewhere out there beyond the
barbwire, and the grass still grows
in the meadows, and the lilies
still bloom on sunlit hillsides
despite it all, yet here I am,
sitting in the golden afternoon
on the incomprehensible
streets of mankind
half-drunk with a 4-day beard
ruminating on nothing valuable,
nothing exceptional,
nothing revolutionary,
just sitting there, alone, in the
feverish gloom of the afternoon
dreaming about pine forests
and jugs of wine
and old trains
slicing through prairies,
quietly awaiting the next
lavender smile
to pass by.
