Sitting at a café
Over the smell of coffee
Scents of car fumes, ***** and ****
Worm their way into your nose.
The men, women, children
Pass you by without a glance
Each one on their own way
As uncaring feet pound pavement.
Indifferent people in expensive suits
Walk by tourists objectifying with cameras
Who accidently capture in their frames
The cold and the old slouching through the streets.
Even relaxing at the table
You feel caught up in the streaming crowds
As if you were being swept away
By these forces fighting for control.
As you sit as idle observer
To the worried pace of the city streets
You can sense the blind and frantic power
Of those who feed off our illusion.
(This illusion lies in each of us
When we close our eyes to the waking world
And believe that we could be happy
In our isolation from reality)
You can see it in the passers-by
Whose eyes focus intently ahead:
Afraid to look at other faces
As if they feared the connection.
Many imprison themselves in aesthetics
Of glass steel towers looking down on the earth
And drive isolation’s grim repetition
In a hopeless effort to make their own world.
Our illusion puts them there
When we do not question the surrounding order
Whose existence allows us to live in comfort
Insulating our delusions.
Our ignorance demands their ignorance
Which caters to our selfishness
And divides the passing days
With the rhythm of their control.
Their thoughts structure steel geography
That dreams that it could scrape the sky
And make its mark on the heavens
By countermanding nature’s will.
But nature stands indifferent to
Man’s attempt to supersede
Its will that gives to him his arrogance
That leads him towards his own destruction.
But I call you from this nature now
To return with me to where I stand:
On this mountain with the trees
Who beckon with their open branches:
Do not fight against nature’s rhythm
That springs the flowers from the ground
As it wills the sun to set upon us
And gives us the food to carry on.
I see myself as this reality
As feet take care to tread on soil
To avoid crushing the delicate petals
That smile upward towards the sun.
Time provides the future harvest,
But of its success, time will tell.
So I stand here with my garden ***
In loving silence, tilling the land.
To breath the air the sky provides
Takes me from my restlessness:
Watching the ground provide the future,
Submitting myself to nature’s pulse.
But the scenery of planned geometry
Which covers soil with concrete slabs,
As if embarrassed by earthly origins,
Tries to move to a different rhythm:
The glare of halogen eyes that stare
In unquiet nights in impatient lines
Find their way towards distant houses
That protect their owners from working lives.
This world screams out from its distortion
Of nature’s will that lies ignored:
It lays the path of its own destruction
As it claims its own power to endure.
But nature’s spirit will always triumph,
Whether through man’s self-inflicted end
At the hands of his selfish illusion,
Or through his careful heeding of the truth:
This world that’s lost its quite places Demands we become its place of quiet;
To silence the thoughts that construct man’s world,
So that we absorb ourselves in nature’s will:
The heart that beats inside you now
Beats not for the one in whom it dwells,
But allows nature a fleeting glimpse
Of itself through conscious human eyes.
This truth whispers even now
From the deafening world of the city streets
That hurries towards its ignorant end
As it attempts to escape its fate.
Do not forsake the earth in waking life,
And wait for death to pull you into the soil
To meld with nature’s majestic cadence
And be one with your reality.