The supposedly symbol free life
ignores its letters.
Fetters slip over eyes and hands
to defy unthought attempts.
All efforts connect outside possibilities,
without individual or contextual regard.
Pretexts smear beneath hypocrisies,
settle into comfortable chairs,
consider dissolution and its arts.
Escape signals burrow into narratives.
Competition's priorities win
when winning feels better
than sunflower May.
Time rears children, adulation to maturity.
Death scowls. Permanent wet towels
hunger for dreams. Dreams want
only the sleep of the head.
Look elsewhere. Nature, then,
sweet dichotomy between candy
and wet Reuben sandwich,
where ants build,
people tend fires.
Past sits between prologue and
intro, waiting to know:
how many pages allotted?
Imaginary tomorrow holds
head too high for spine
waits for the algorithm
to define function.
No self-respecting reader accepts
that writing on that wall.
In a house of glass hands,
elbow typist is keyboard emperor.
Finding out who you are:
the American scream.
Fear rules middle earthen
hearts like the terroir of a land
with more to say than its inhabitants.
And yet this is no symbol hoard,
no Colorado lode.
Sunsets smear skies, yes.
Rivers carve canyons.
Signifiers must mean more
than what they are,
more than purple for mountains' sake,
amber for waves' breeze.
These houses home pupils and scruples
discernible patterns in interest and earnings
novels sloughed off lavender ocean-sides.
And yet and yet and yet
the middle worldly mind thirsts
droughted with doubts
pouting
unsure of steps or sticks or stones
hurt, broken, unresolved,
built on progenitor-promised marshes
three layers at a time
primordial muck
that would be solid
if you wait long enough
neck-deep
gasping faith and hard work
into the cricket night.
Roman Ryan 