Democrat, Illinois - The ElectroLounge

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Soldiers? Fight what? Nobody protests, was this expected, is this how people are,
triggers to any voice calling out “crisis! run!” I didn’t think so but here we are hustling
downstairs to rooms below, shouts gone, now all is silence & crowded people pushed up
together, the men with worn bearded faces, the women covered in shawls, I wonder how
close they remain to the trouble above, & press along, further down—
fewer people now & something good in this, I’m tired of it, the feeling the world is a
farm & we feed like pigs & stand stupidly within pens waiting for more—
I don’t feel like I’m walking but I move along, spaces open out, roads, trees, a
running figure once, & later again, where bound? Is this still a ship?
How did I get here? What is this place? Why don’t people ask, demand to know! I
arrived here with no answers & the only ones I ever hear involve suffering & vague reward,
& people nod & take up their oars, feed silently, brood but only in dreams & sickness, & in
youth—
It’s fading, what was it? How can its years go so easily? Where now? Where to?
Music. People. My friend looking at me. I think of him as a friend because he looks
at me with love. He’s a person who is good at that. So I call him my friend with hope inside
me.
Ah.
!
lxviii.
I look down & ache at it again, something not like fiction anymore, I truly don’t
know what, pen swabs page with words & days go—
I write: “World boils in broken blood” & marvel at its sound & sense & disgust at
any beauty come from suffering, then wonder what else could,
suffering & beauty what oppose in this world? one could say so but wonder what else
missing,
Not enough to fill pages, or pass painless through the many hours, or alone care
when caring’s a fine welcome thing—
Not enough to rub the world a little this way & that, loose something up but not so
much a roll begins—
Not enough these notebooks & their years of cries—more, I think, more, not
knowing what or how—
Boils in broken blood, maybe that’s best I can do, maybe one presses back the world
how it presses first—
Weakness, a want to rave higher, to call it all to a blessed point—what? what?
Little happens but exchange of day & night—
true?
Everything happens by exchange of day & night—
better?
Not enough.
I wonder how to make a ragged sheaf matter.
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