where some punk on sax and his friend
on electric piano play "the future
of jazz," you walk over the bridge
than spans the mangrove river
bed, the last vestige of Florida
here, in this strip of rockets
and strip clubs and cruise ships,
pass through this arch of polo shirts
and gold chains, so many men shouting
into cell phones, to whom?, until you
enter the sinister silver glare,
the heat, the sand, the ocean,
the gulf stream. This is the existential
scene, to be stranded here on the edge
of the west, there is nothing here,
nothing but the migraine heat
soothed only by the sudden rain.
After all the margaritas
and mojitos, women in long
dresses and earrings that tingle
like wind chimes, the iced coronas
and seared yellow-fin tuna,
the papayas and gator wrasslin,
you have only this, the heat,
the ocean's slick silver skin.
There are no words here.
No language that can carry
our stories on into the future.
You have come here
to die. There's no escaping
this, the quintessential fact.
It turns out there is no soul
after all, no redemption
or absolution or grace, not even
the decency of an epiphany.
It is godless and mindless,
just your skin scraped raw
by all this coarse sand,
the shimmering atomic age
insinuating itself everywhere,
radiation burning time itself.
No comments:
Post a Comment