Free at Last


He returns to plough the fields of stones,
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 his bank manager can claim
To know something about his affair
Just because there's nothing to spare,
As if he can go and lie down to sleep
Just because he is weary of the day				
If his 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 dame discusses poverty.				15

With no hindu insights and pitilessly,
He was taught to live alone on a moon,
Where life passed in an impervious tube.
Then instructed to cherish confusion,
In shards of structural glass				
He drew cubic homes for the believers.
Whether in wet jungle or dry desert,
The trace of man grew ever so aligned
In the mind full of singular aims.
He imagined a set of grey silhouettes
Which punctured the earth like chrome studs
Piercing the pink cheeks of plastic dolls.
T'wasn't history that kept him blind,
T'wasn't the principles rescinded,
T'was the thought, he by himself was made.				30

He is freed from the rubrics of manhood.
From the tyranny of King Richard III,
From scheming, murderous, insidious plots, 
From seeing the world as a field of lust,
A fecund factory ready for his power.
He would mimic the ethics toiling the 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 cannot alone scale the barbed tiers,
As wit cannot alone tame the beast of fears
Without the sword that rips its tentacles.
Unless he becomes a foot soldier first,
He'll keep blushing like a girl afraid
To say that all she really wants is love.					45

He fears the groomed guardians of taste,
Are the useen prophets of the mindset,
Policing the right orders of the order.
Making laws for the soft artichoke heart,
They set fresh frontiers of the untold good.
No one laughed as the naked actor spoke.
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 billion gurus of sanity,
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.
He reads the classics to learn the clichés
To start surpassing his limits in time,
To save his divided soul from exclusion,
By blind justice, his rightful padded seat
Beyond the philosopher's paradise,
In the hall of melodious memories.					75

He would 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,
He didn't see how the dust of truth mixed
In the fields of brown grain and 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 stories
About a big bang making the stars twinkle
By showing me a brighter photograph.					90

It matters not if one is not believed.
He now uses his voice for that Irish 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?
They pay a heavy price to be excused
For losing that Manly 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 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 open the eyes and take a look around.
Awaken the pulses of the skin made thick
Carrying useless scruples and strange ideas.
Pass through the walls and fall through floors,
Hear the throbbing inside the ears
And ask if one understands the nuances
Of the all the mothers' peculiar tongues					120

He wakes to a deep terror of failure.
Success is not a predisposition
It is merely a material effect
Of the workings of a ring of power,
So everyone gets his just rewards.
In the drama of wanting and having,
Ability is merely the requisite.
Concise actions turn labour into art.
Nerves wobble and bend into a performance
where whims 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.
He left on the surf of the desert sands
And like Gulliver lost his sense of scale.					135

From the last turn at the fork on the road
Somewhere is at last good enough for him.
He is surrounded by the magic of speech.
Here he feels somewhat like a fugitive.
Whilst he never thought he would cause offence
The warm climate invites indiscretions.
The Latin spirit is a gregarious host,
But his grace spoils even the most earnest
With pleasant feelings that lull the mind,
Like a slow parade of moving shadows
In permissive dealings between elfins,
Taught early to be sweet children of God
By stout ladies with nice creamy shoulders.
In the towns of playgrounds and mazes,
He's been playing hide and seek by himself.				150

Notwithstanding the belief in freedom
He detects the presence of dominions
Fighting over his spirit and body.
And if the vein of truth runs down the spine,
He feels it only in moments of prayer
Even as a witness to the Saviour's kindness,
As if to haunt his dreams weren't fun enough,
They still cling and pain all his waking hours.
The human condition spreads through his joints.
Made to fit a sharp pencil in between,
His fingers itch to draw or strum the strings,
But unless he strives he might expire.
The system has a hold on everything
Including the most famous rhyming poets
Who make a living even as they cry.					165

Where are the long-forgotten 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,
Where satisfaction makes for something real,
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 need for cohesion,
To see the self without inhibition,
Maybe even smugly practice some virtues
By loving all thy neighbours as thyself,
But in these times he doesn't need help.
He moves everywhere in a big new car.
The system endows the right rights.
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

He obeys the law out of fear management.
If truth be beauty and beauty is truth
Honesty and artistry must be bound
Into a dialogue only 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 now remembered just in paintings,
That world, in essence, still may well exist,
If they 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 clean 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,
Believing that he lives by God's amazing grace,
Inside a definite parameter
Of inescapable circumstances
Which he accepts unconditionally,
As his own unique hope for happiness.				225

Lucignano, 6 June 2006