JOURNEY I

There should be silence in your song.
The clergy has it all wrong.
Seven heavens in five spheres.
All prostrate to such dastardly fears.
Me, I’ve had enough of these books.
There’s another way to look…

can’t you hear:

the silent cry
of clouds in the sky
warns us not to try.
these museums are filled with lies.
Can’t you see:

You embrace her phony face;
even Holden is a disgrace,
trying to find love in this place.

why wait?

the story never ends
until the fabric screen rends
with sounds of What do? Where to? Why-when?
and sleep is all you can comprehend.

in this place:

Can’t you see
your concrete tomb?
Off the bus
there’s more room.

At last

You have found the door.
I thought you were lost,
when they made that wall.
Windows are not big enough for you and me
Out here on the perimeter, we are free?

(but are we?
Never free,
not in the periphery,
not you,
not me.
“Further,” said the bus.)

but must we?

then further we shall go,
past the periphery where the voices of buses wax low,
and instead just stars
(too hard to count),
no cars,
the heavenly cacophony of the space between light.

At last

We have gone beyond
Where all that is black expels all that is it.
It collides with calculators
and Pi rains down to a million trillion digits.
Fools open their mouths and swallow it up.

why wait?

For the others to finish dancing,
Fourth dimensional treadmills are for those that ask the
Questions.
The answers have no need to understand
because (no more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’
dirty looks)
they are free.

can’t you see:

that this place is big enough for you and me,
as long as we embrace infinity.
the closer we come,
the more room there’ll be.

can’t you hear:

the music is very high,
too high for the sleeping ears of women and men,
it is the rhythmic piercing of the pig’s fly-infested head
by children with spears dancing round irregular septagons.

The music is too loud to dance to,
But yet the fools ignore and continue.
The light is bright and beautifully mad.
and so the its and others sleep in the shade.
but for you and me, together has departed;
this journey into pure existence has started.

–Amir Lopatin