The Perspicacity of Rain

by Stew Jorgenson

 

 

I wanted to talk about falling Romans,

declining imperatives,

large scale ineptitudes,

the shortage of elevated thinking,

high tech window peeping.

I wanted to say all

there is to say about

ideological turpitude,

hemispheric pressure,

moral viscosity,

social insolvency,

oceanic perturbances,

historical sediment,

and carbonated skies.

I wanted to spill my guts

in a violent rage of

righteous recompense

for the lost city on a hill,

its fraudulent afflictions,

intemperate thresholds,

shrinking civil habitat,

sacred insanities,

institutional atrophy,

cruel impotence,

blame games,

and the gurgling grudge

of third degree spurns

refusing to heal.

I wanted to rant about

the pitiful plight of injustice,

give people a reason

to vent about nothing,

gripe about grievances,

tongue tied imprisonments,

intractable resentments,

crippling betrayals,

emotional lacerations,

and decry the ruination of love.

I wanted to say something

that would make the sun bleed,

and beg forgiveness for its

smug indifference to our needs

but I didn’t want to get sidetracked by

celestial politics,

the co-mingling of souls,

animal magnetism,

longitudinal shortcomings,

aeronautical proclivities,

or mathematical probabilities in

the dissemination of kindness.

I thought that might sound

a bit whacked,

giving credence to all sorts of

paranoid prognostications by

gentrified social engineers

with slide rules and zip ties,

so I backed off on that program.

I also wanted to put in a plug for

compassionate forbearance,

and call attention to the

imaginative logistics

of wearing other people’s shoes.

But most of all,

I just wanted to take pleasure in

the abiding conviction of words,

peel back a few layers of

caterwauling concerns,

and declare how hard it is

to stay grounded in dreamscapes,

while groping for sentient cohesion

 

in the tangled tribulations of life.