golem

I believe I understand them now,
years into life, no going back
to mumble ‘Aha!’ or alter a quip,
an eye-roll, internal judgments
of the simply humans who brought me
into this life;

A child knows all, we wax wiser
than they, are meant to drive the world
forward, inception spinning threads,
moving eons of evolutionary spiral,
giving and taking our own progressions,
transgressions;

Product of our times as were they,
post-war (and aren’t we all?),
Beginnings of encumbering the collective
with awareness of itself, the most dire
among us, diving headlong
into fantasy strobes, dancing
until they dropped, Big Bands,
juxtaposition of light and a newly-found
affluence, the suburbs where we tottered,
innocent as lambs rambling freely
in our white-washed ‘hoods,
bright sidewalks, manicured shrubs,
nothing savage enough to pull mother noses
out of romance novels,
while fathers roamed freely,
new kings in a jungle of love;

I do not harken back, knew those times
were deadly, atom bombs and fallout shelters,
too much hidden in closets,
shadow boxing enemies just like us, inside
themselves afraid of a world growing larger,
power looming over them like the weight
of white supremists’ war of words
or of worlds;

Present-tense knee-jerk repulsion,
demeaning lyrics swallowed whole
into the beat, the beat driving generations
forward, technology-thumping
into oblivion of its own unmaking, rise
and fall of crises too numerous to court
before the next cycle consumes
momentary interest, all we can hold
in bleeding hearts bursting open
with empathic resonance,
We have been here before ringing,
burning in aging ears;

There was order then, or its illusion,
stuff made sense, it was possible
to contain evil, who were we kidding?
Crying consciousness, children
of the ‘sixties watching all coming
to fruition and wanting regression back
to what was familiar, blanketed blur
of memory, having initiated it all to begin
with and knowing it’s impossible,
get it out, out where it trembles, blinking
like the golem that it is, and it is I,
it is Us, it is Humanity’s Shadow,
and it never was a thing of beauty.