SMOKEY TENDRILS

Parting from the path that purpose plows,
I find myself awandering in the wondering of pondering.
Like the smoke that set them loose,
Tendrils of curiosity and supposing
Weave new patterns of previous endeavors
On looms of levity and leisure
Lending viability to uselessness
In a landscape made for loving.
Separate lives sharing the common currency of inspiration;
Wishing and doing the best we’ve learned how ‘til now.

Are there those so helpless
They must take the life of another?
Is human society a security blanket for all against nature,
Or the latest trend triumphantly trampling unfashionable savages
Beneath robot heels of steel and circuitry
Remotely controlled by insecure heroes squashing icky bugs
To make the world safe for the grandest, greediest bully gang?

Because we can, must we?
Our hubris mindlessly manifests our imaginations
in creation of children, artifacts and markets,
painting ourselves into overpopulated corners
Without resource or recourse
But to make more and more war
Upon those making do with less and less.
Will there come a time
When happiness will no longer be a goal out there
But realized to be our essence all along?
The way we pass it up sometimes, makes me wonder.
Belief in its accomplishment
Veils the author of the urge.
We bury what we seek beneath the rubble
Of our discarded methods of searching.
Until one wants to be where one is,
One cannot realize what one has.
Until the present is more important than the future
One cannot perceive who one is.
Happiness is the magma at our core
Contained within our crusty mantle of cool sophistication
So completely that neon girls and racial jokes
Have become our desperate imitation substitute.

Daring to be happy in the miserable face of these “interesting times”
Can only seem like the careless ignorance of a child.
But I foundoubt,
Reality comes apart at the seems
Through which it may be glimpsed that,
Concern for another’s attitude toward my happiness
Degrades it to a conditional state
And is the chill that forms the crust.
Babies become acceptable when
They no longer grin at the tangle of society’s knots
But earnestly join in pulling on their end of the chain of events
As if their life depended on it.