Hyperion to a Satyr: A Lament

From my kitchen window I see on high,

Down low, a small and alabaster sprite

Whose concrete wings cannot flutter with a cry

But if wings could wipe tears, they might.

For he sits on top a sphere in the yard

With fists tucked under small and solid chin

And knees, as bounded and just as hard,

Steadies both like a shelled terrapin

With heavy load; he sits on top a hardened

World and I imagine he too weeps for

The dead.  Weighted stone will not be pardoned

And he and I seem same to the very core.

Strewn around him, and around his world,

Littered like an archaic battlefield,

Lie many deadened leaves defeated, curled

In a purgatorial wait for what they’ll yield.

And these very leaves will after some time

Decay and dissolve into a dirt grave

Where future man will go to seek and mine

And look for the blackened gold they’ve

Come to need.  He will dig and sift   

Unless no future need to run his hard

Engines. But I sit and sometimes wish

My own soft engine, as flawed and marred,

The cause of the ghost inside my vessel,

Might, in quicker time, seep back to earth

Entombed alive as if oathed by vestals.

But what future use who knows what worth?

But this is all folly, just another Hamlet act;

I will not make the move. I too am deemed

Haunted by a ghosted sight; also racked

By a regretful pain felt hard and keen.  

From a nameless cliff I see on high, down low

The rumbling, streamlined lines of a naval ship

Whose dead grey hue turns to smoke as it goes

While it’s soul rumbles under as it rips

Through indifferent seas.  And I on a wake

Lie lifeless in the stormiest reach

My own sail as torn as the heart it navigates

Thrown toward the shore of the loveliest beach.

Then I imagine my father with outstretched hand

Like the old Book's last fiery scene

With one foot in the water and one on land.

Atonement thirsts on the oases of dreams.

It has often been said death is not proud.

Nor would I fain to say he is even smug.

But while it’s I that’s full of fury and the sound,

Death took—and takes--with stony shrugs.

John Locke's Sock, or; Selfhood

Good ole empirical minded John Locke,

Though surely bound to task to make them match,

Held deep thoughts where, like a drawer, lay his socks.

His favourite one was prone to holes, though duly patched

As when a diabolical gap blank as minds grew.

He sewed it shut (or filled it?) with a different cloth

And his cherished sock, growing old, was made as new

And preserved as he desired it to be: As it was.

But our thoughts of what we deem same we upend

As material fades and begets anew.

And we wonder on it, again, then again,
And read in to our desire a hope it is true.

Shells over spirit, we are held fast by cells

That shed and repair like the lost limb of

Lazarus lizard, always fixing itself.

We are darned cloth, changelings enough

To wonder: are we preserved as we were?

And spirit, too, is mind fraying and unwinding.

But the illusory thread of thought is the allure

That we are always the same, invisible minding

Of memory like a favourite sock.
What makes me the same as a minute ago?
What changes in me at the strike of a clock?
Who will I be in an hour or so?

Is it this that holds hard and fast the seams

As time unravels the ‘self.’ Time gone wears thin.
Though as bare the threads of my memories of me,

I remember Tom so well but know I am not him.

I see no me that ponders now this very moment.
Is it a thing of the brain, and a soul attached?

Yet thoughts of now, and remembrance of when,

Seem a seamless whole, though duly patched.