Poetry

* * * * * *

What Will It Mean?

By Rick Alan Rice (RAR)

Copyright © RAR 2011 (May 3, 2011)

What will it mean?

Bin Laden is dead,

Killed by a bullet

As he rose in his bed

Perhaps from his sleep

Awakened by wings

The pulsating pistons

Of killing machines

“Praise be to Allah”,

 “Fuck!”

Or some such thing,

Surely he muttered

As shots rang and women screamed

We infidels will never know

Where devout Muslim spirits go

When in their dreams

They hear the sounds

Of Navy Seals on the ground

But what of now?

These noisy streets,

The TV screens,

Is that youth at a party?

What is that they sing?

In Manhattan

At the haunted square

Where towers crumbled

From high, thin air

Oh caterwaul to the I bring

Such tithes of grave dependencies

On populations fraught with fear

That Armageddon’s growing near

The boogeyman

Who once we found

Through news reports and

Books and sound

Now lays there

Wrapped in death-frock white

Now slipping into black of night

Beneath the waves

To Allah’s praise

Now taking us

To Where?

What void will revelers replace

Now that their cause has been erased

Surveillance now must redirect

Toward others whom we now suspect

Kim-Jong sleep with fleas tonight

Admanajad you’d best stay bright

For we have learned to take the fight

To where you are in black of night

And everything

We say is true

And every truth is aimed at you,

To thee I sing.

Key resources laid to waste

That could have built

But went to chase

This boogeyman,

Now in the sea

What did he mean?

A generation lived with him

And knew his themes

And knew his myths.

Now what of them?

What of them

That the War is Won

The killing of enemy number one?

Has it made us safe

As we rest in our rooms,

Or is that something outside,

In the chilling gloom?

A restive people

Tasting blood

Up late

With morning soon to come

Perhaps their joy

Will take to ground

And spread…

But what is that sound?

Is that a helo setting down?

I have come to regard "The Clues" as my own Dante's Inferno, a descent into the nightmarish confusion of broken heartedness, including eternal pain.

The Clues

©RAR 2008

I was young and not too quick to
Pick up on the clues that you threw
Took me by surprise when
You told me goodbye

It seemed like time stood still
Like I was locked inside a vault of timeless
Pain - My own weight crushed my bone to the
Relief of polished stone

Then a gouging curse engulfed the sky
The birds above began to cry
And lovers clung to reasons why
They shouldn’t cease to give

A dark bird flew across the sun
Somebody pulled a shiny gun
Another cried “He is the one!”
Another mugged the holy bum

I was young and not too fit
The clues were round me thick as brick
I didn’t have the first idea
What to do with the best of it

With all that time to fill
I locked myself inside the halls of dark
Until my eyes sealed over and
I groped in constant night

Then aroused I woke and cut the binds
And called your name and drank your wine
And wrote all day and night with you
In mind like broken hearted do

Then morning came and I arose
And put aside my sullen pose
And walked into the morning sun
And held my ground

All my life you been around
Pain, ugliness is all I’ve found
This life ain’t sweet enough
It lasts too long and it’s way too rough
My love is waiting for you

This life ain’t rich enough
It costs too much and there’s too much bluff
My love is waiting for you

I was young and all alone
And couldn’t get you on the phone
It caused me such alarm
You never seemed to be at home

It seemed like moss grew round my brain
And I behaved a bit insane
I cursed at God and punched the sky
But I could never really cry

I carry you inside me yet
A tortured thing I can’t forget
A bit of me got lost in you
The way that stupid people do

But time has come, time has gone
And took away my holy bond
I can’t believe, I cannot love
I’m still the lonely one

All my life you been around
Pain, ugliness is all I’ve found
This life ain’t sweet enough
It lasts too long, it’s way too rough
My love is waiting for you

This life ain’t rich enough
It costs too much - there’s too much bluff
My love is waiting for you

I Can Hardly Believe How Hard It Was to Be Me Before the Internet 

©RAR 2007

I can hardly believe

how hard it was 

to be me

Before

the Internet

For those who would like information, click here...

Riding On A Zephyr 

©RAR 2005

Riding On A Zephyr is a song born of a childhood memory. There used to be a passenger train that ran between Chicago and Denver called the Denver Zephyr. (Zephyr was the Greek and Roman God of the refreshing west wind.) There it became the California Zephyr for the leg from Denver to Oakland. For reasons now lost to me, my mother and I rode the Denver Zephyr when I was a kid in the late 1950s and in memory it was one of those foundation events. Though the line had operated since 1931, the Zephyrs seemed like real Cadillacs in their day, symbols of American technological wonder. To me, looking back, they represented the confident plunge into the future that was the American experience of the 1950s. History, however, didn't stop at that moment of serene naiveté. As a nation, we were in the grip of historic events. I could see it in my own family, as my father in his career was swept by a wave of technology that carried him from the age of television to the race for outer space. Along the way something went terribly wrong -- for all of us. That is what Riding On A Zephyr is about.

It started on a military base

Right outside of East St. Louis

Daddy was a radio man

It was nineteen fifty-two

 

Momma was a small town girl

By way of Oakland, California

All they had in common the mistake

Who is singing now to you

 

Everyone around us there

Was black as night, dark as murder

Everyone was poor

The men all dressed in uniform

 

Living there among them

We didn't really fit in but we tried to be friendly

That's how it was told to me

When I was old enough to hear the tale

 

After the Korean War

Daddy decided to leave the service

We headed for Nebraska

And the cold Nebraska plains

 

Riding on the Zephyr

Riding on the hope of a nation

Trying to get better

Than we had ever been before

 

Riding in to modern times

Tuning in to The World of Tomorrow

The new frontier

And revolution on the way

 

Midway through the time of Eisenhower

Daddy was part of a television age

Cathode rays, vacuum tubes and solder

Fixing a beam on the atomic rage

 

We were living on a tree-lined street

In Lincoln across from Tom, Dick and Harry

You could say these were innocent times

Everybody seemed to same

 

I think that we were happy then

But the best to come was just around the corner

Wind was sweeping under our wings

And there was magic everywhere

 

Riding on the Zephyr

Riding on the hope of a nation

Trying to get better

Than we had ever been before

 

Riding in to modern times

Tuning in to The World of Tomorrow

The new frontier

And revolution on the way

 

Soon enough a change was made

We picked up and moved to Denver, Colorado

Daddy got a job engineering

The mighty race for space

 

Momma's hair was turning silver

Though she was only twenty-seven

She didn't seem to mind

She was living in the laser light of day

 

Then in nineteen fifty-eight

There came along a little brother

Everything revolved around

Our nuclear family

 

Don't adjust your TV set

The vertical hold or the horizontal

We control the whole thing

All you have to do is sit

 

In a new dimension we were

Getting up early to see the launches

Titan, Mercury and Apollo

We were gilded in the flames

 

Sunning like a movie star

In our back yard with all the young mothers

Momma like a debutante

In those gold Colorado days

 

A whole generation asking

What can you do for your country

Then one day in Dallas

The answer came rumbling from the sky

 

The crack in the cosmic egg

Ripped with a sound out of Dealey Plaza

Pieces of the President's brain

Splattered on the ground

 

We saw it as a nation

We saw it on our TV screen

This place we all thought we were headed

Was not quite what it seemed

 

After that things started to get ugly

We went back to war, off to Viet Nam

Things began to feel quite different

In the home of the brave and the Promised Land

 

The world turned and it kept on changing

You could see it in the way people wore their hair

You could hear it in the streets where the protest was raging

You could hear the poet's howls in the liberty bell

 

And so it showed in the New Republic

And so it showed in the New York Times

And so it showed in the neighborhood theater

It was way too late for us to change our minds

 

Martin Luther King on a balcony in Memphis

Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel

Mayor Richard Daley on a hot night in Chicago

Richard Nixon on a cold night in hell

 

A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind

One too many slogans, one too many lines

One big blowout up in Woodstock

One too many holes shot in our Altamont minds

 

Riding on the Zephyr

Riding on the hope of a nation

Trying to get better

Than we had ever been before

 

Riding in to modern times

Tuning in to The World of Tomorrow

The new frontier

And revolutions fade away

 

Now I'm old and it seems like a movie

The way a smile disappears from a face

We never got to Canaan, never got to Canterbury

All we pilgrims got was the human race

                                            © RAR 2005