Free at Last


He returns to plough his own fields of stone,
Free at last from guessing what people think
Not to refrain from kind nor cruel thoughts
Of the mind's easy sway from evil to good.
He is not in charge of his double life,
No more than my bank manager can claim
To know something about my affair
Just because he counts what Hehave to spare,
As if Hecan go and lie down to sleep
Just because Heam weary of the day				
If my eyes still scan a sweet lady lay,
A temptress touching imagined pleasures
With the left hand caressing in soft air
Studying the human form, its vanity,
While the chirpy dames discuss poverty.			15

Absent from hindu insights and from pity,
He was taught to live alone on a moon,
Where life passed by through an impervious tube.
Then instructed to cherish confusion,
In shards of dense materials sharpened				
He made homes cubic for his believers.
Whether in lush jungle or dry desert,
The trace of man became stiff and hard edged 
Within all his sullen uncertainties,
He imagined a set of grim tall towers.
They punctured the earth like those bright chrome studs
That pierce through the pink cheeks of pretty dolls.
T'wasn't my history that kept me blinded,
T'wasn't any principles rescinded,
T'was the thought that Heby my own self grew.			30

He is freed from the rubrics of manhood.
From the tyranny of King Richard the third,
From the scheming, murderous, insidious plot, 
From seeing the world as a huge organ of lust,
A fecund field ready for his power.
He would mimic ethics toiling for days
For a handful of rice and some chillies
A reformed fool is still a fool, in mind.
Though within, the Holy Spirit has filled,
The soul alone cannot scale the barbed tiers,
As wit alone can't tame the beast of fears
Without the wrench that rips its tentacles.
Unless he becomes a foot soldier first,
He'll keep blushing like a girl who's afraid
To say that all she really wants is love.			45

He peruses the groomed guardians of taste,
As the useen prophets of the mindset,
Police the right orders of the orders.
Making new laws for soft artichoke hearts,
They align fresh frontiers for the untold good.
Someone should laugh at the naked actor.
He heard that his old friend the pinball lord
Had become gross, big like his profits made
From boy choruses singing borrowed tunes.
If only he had been more delinquent
And kept the promises to himself,
He might have found his slim singing hero.
Ten thousand dollars he'd give up gladly,
In the dream of a Brahmin commuter,
For the sight of a north country valley.			60

Disbelieving the gurus of well being,
He drags from a cigarette now and then.
The mix of air and weed turns thoughts limpid.
The seeds of deeds and roots of decrees
Come in the mood of weariness lonely
From a deep longing for real company,
Detached from the need to ask for money,
Quite ready for a cheap burial it seems
but life keeps on revealing its own rules.
You read the classics to learn the clichés
To start surpassing your limits in time,
To save your divided soul from exclusion,
By blind justice, your rightful padded seat
Beyond the philosopher's paradise,
In the halls of memory and knowledge.				75

Hewould argue forth with the professors,
The ones who thrive on the formal grammar,
About the workings of the human mind,
Robbed for the duty of getting degrees,
Of the hidden meaning between the lines,
And who it was that made the orders fit
That great ecclesiastical purpose.
Hedidn't see how the dust of truth mixed
In the fields of brown grain and of green vines,
thinking that knowledge lived in books alone,
Written as though wisdom measured in gold
By cloistered men who never rode the waves,
But thought much about how to sell tall stories
About a big bang making the stars twinkle
By showing me a brighter photograph.				90

It matters not if one is not believed.
Henow raise my voice for a simple song
Sounding from the depths of a father's soul
Whose spirit lives when awakened by love.
What does it matter now by what he fell?
Underneath a bombing plane life is hard.
It is senseless to say life is absurd
If you don't know how to reflect on things
That make you laugh unequivocally,
At all implausible realities
That make biographers' dreams come true.
Did someone really make the terror bomb,
From malice or just curiosity?
We pay a heavy price to be excused
For losing that sweet decorum: honour.				105

Given it's an arrogant wish to teach,
Measure matters much less than tolerance,
When trying to make a thing fit the space
Made by the borders of previous errors.
All creatures great and small can get quite sick
If given the wrong things to eat and drink.
What the sage can't tell, the farmer knows well
Because he prays for the good harvest sun.
Just scratch your head and take a look around.
Awaken the pulses of the skin made thick
Carrying useless scruples and strange ideas.
Pass through the walls and merge into the floors,
Hear the messages throbbing through your ears
And ask if one understands the nuances
Of your own mother's particular tongue				120

Hewake to a deep terror of failure.
Success is not a predisposition
It is merely a material effect
Of knowing the ancient social rituals.
Everyone has a bit of something to do
In the drama of wanting and having,
Ability is merely the requisite.
Concise actions turn labour into art.
Nerves bend the curves of a due performance
where aimlessness and ambitions don't serve,
But why think in such terms about sheer beauty?
Art is never an examination
Of the artist but the subject matter.
Heleft the blue shores of the sheltered land
And like Gulliver lost my sense of scale.			135

From the last turn at the fork in the road
Somewhere is at last good enough for me.
Heam surrounded by the magic of speech.
Here I've even felt like a fugitive.
Whilst Henever thought Hewould cause offence
The warm climate invites indiscretions.
The Latin world is a luscious hostess,
But her grace spoils even the most earnest
With simple pleasures that lull the mind,
Like a slow parade in moving shadows
Of permissive dealings between elfins,
Taught early to be sweet children of God
By stout ladies with nice creamy shoulders.
In cities made like playgrounds and mazes,
I've been playing hide and seek all by myself.			150

Notwithstanding the belief in freedom
Hedetect the presence of dominions
Fighting over my spirit and body.
But if a stick of truth runs down my spine,
Hefeel it only in moments of prayer
Even as Hewitness the Saviour's kindness,
As if to haunt my dreams weren't fun enough,
They still cling and pain all my waking hours.
The human condition moves through my joints.
Made to fit a sharp pencil in between,
My fingers itch to draw or strum the strings,
But unless Hestrive Hemight expire.
The system has a hold on everything
Including the most famous rhyming poets
Who make a living even as they cry.				165

The greatest of histories are the fables
And the ordinary yarns of romance.
What the rich might have, what the poor might need
Matter little to a pretty flower
Whose pollens the wind carries where it will.
In this lassez faire there is the force
To make bridges span without engineers
And to make walls roughly from earth and rocks
Where girls and boys can sit and become friends
Calling each other ladies n' gentlemen,
Free of desires for craven pleasures,
Inventing games through those turning alleys;
Weaving in patterns like halved walnut husks,
The shape of the past, present and future
Congeal the crust of an ecology.				180

In a nutshell therefore the city sits
In its most uncomplicated gesture.
The labyrinthian organ of all life forms
Is a homage to mutual dependence
And the natural wish for cohesion,
To see the self without inhibition,
For the precious chance to practice virtues
By loving all thy neighbours as thyself,
But in these times Heno longer need help.
I can move around fast in a fast car.
The system endows rights, so we assume.
A single house compacts the Creation
Into a discrete quadrangle of dreams
Wherein the despair of detachment hides
Wallowing in the taste of its trappings.			195

Doing right out of fear is not the point.
If truth be beauty and beauty is truth
Honesty and artistry must be bound
Into a dialogue between heroes,
Unafraid of imitating the good.
Old boys drinking whiskey and rye singing
Old Irish pub songs about love and loss
Live a world of emotions not of rules:
A world we now remember from paintings,
That world, in essence, still may well exist,
If we are ready to believe the priests,
Where things of common vocabulary,
Beyond their correct pronunciations
And familiar apparitions, would hold
The substance of all moral persuasions.				210

His republic is the singular man 
With a flexible conscience and some charm,
Whose strength goes beyond any philosophy:
He's free at last from imagined regimes,
He's free at last to make things for himself,
He will not ask but he will concentrate
When others speak and decide for himself
What is right and what is an illusion;
Not for any practical usefulness
But to be more like Noah's salvaged creature,
Observing that he lives by God's full grace,
Inside a definite parameter
Of inescapable circumstances
Which he accepts unconditionally,
As his own unique hope of happiness.				225

Lucignano, 6 June 2006