Disarray

night fever
(Image by Yuya Tamai)   Details   DMCA

What will you do when that last
jukebox has played its last song?
Where will you go then,
when that last drink has been poured and
that last stale cigarette smoked?
What can you do after that last crow has cawed
over that last pale meadow where
you have walked and walked
and thought and thought?
And where will you go then and
what will you do when
the stars build in the sky and the moon
moves slowly through the clouds?
And what book can you pull from
that shelf that will bring it all together
into that one syllable that will be the last one?
What sound from the TV will make
there, just there, so right?
When will you at last yawn, unable to
hold open your eyes? And, then, what
will you do when dawn comes
and moves the last stars from the sky and
traffic begins to move past your window,
where muffled voices, unattached to anything,
pass by...leaving their salient silence behind?
Where will you go then---where can you go?
In what direction shall you point yourself,
and how will you know when you have arrived--
if your destination is not a place but a time?
What business will you find at hand?
What right moment to hold?
These are the questions that must go unanswered...
that will always go unanswered.
Yet you ask them over and over
like a patient sick with fever, fixated on some
delirium-driven thought that cannot be shaken.
This is your lot
acquired at that last round corner
where you should have turned, but didn't;
at that last door you should have entered,
but didn't. And that is why, and that is where,
you should have, but didn't.