Mythopoetry Scholar

Annual Reflections In Depth Perspectives

Three Poems
"It's Hot In Here", "Enough" and "Flight Information"
-Bradley Olson

It’s Hot In Here

It’s very hard to tell anymore, the difference

Between crazy and insane.
 
Between dictatorship and democracy.

Between leadership and oedipal histrionics.

Between Republicans and Democrats.

Between war and peace.

When did the leaving of one’s senses become de riguer?

When did the dulling of one’s compassion,

Of one’s generosity,

Of one’s politeness become, so much, the rage?

(I guess having all your belongings tossed outside the gate

And loosing the keys to paradise—even though you knew better—

Would make anyone a little resentful…)

Of course polite politics probably has never been a reality;

Neither the existence of the kind, thoughtful and compassionate masses.

A mere fiction employed to make our present even more difficult to bear,

Like tales told of a golden age ruled by goddesses, peace, and prosperity.

Politics have always been the arena for the “civilized” applications of rage.

Rulers have never been benevolent,

Masses of humans have never been humane, or

Wise

Kind

Far-seeing,

Willing to feel vulnerable in order to witness a greater truth.

And so, once again, a piece of the planet is going up in smoke…

Am I just crazy, or is it getting hot in here? 

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ENOUGH

“There’s no accounting for taste,” the woman said as she walked by,

the contents of my life displayed on the stoop for everyone to see.

Pleasant to me, but then I’ve always been easy to please.

“That’s all there is?” my friends look puzzled and I, bleary eyed

replied, “That’s enough.”

Enough of cramming empty souls with distilled spirit

Enough of gleefully judging others from a brief, fleeting glimpse

Enough of measuring the Self with a material yardstick never intended for that use

Enough of living in squalor and pain, and watching everyone else attempting the bridge to Endymion, or failing that, to Manhattan.

Enough of worrying about whether time exists to live

amid the excesses of death and blinding ambition;

Enough worrying of days marching by, and all the while I’ve found

no clearer truth, no better lie, than the one given to me so many years ago

filled with nothing but left turns that make long, lazy, looping circles on the horizon.

Eliot said that April was the month most cruel, but I have a hunch

that each month is no more cruel than another.

All seem to be heartless with neither thought nor regret, and bunched

one after the other, riding the dragon named, Thou Shalt

through the blood soaked years.

There’s no accounting for taste, and there’s no accounting for time

Yet, we try to accumulate each as if they were shells on the beach

and no amount of comfort, not any number of nursery rhymes

restores to us a sense of wholeness or peace.

That’s enough.  It’s more than enough.  What I haven’t got will do just fine.

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Flight Information

I watched her from behind my newspaper

Trying to read a pulpy paperback

While the disembodied voice of flight information

(in both English and Spanish)

destroyed her concentration and sent her

eyes scouting the page for the word she last read.

When she left to board I wondered if she would ever finish

If the heroine would find love at long last

If the evils in her life would be overcome by good

If the someone waiting for her at some other airport gate

loved her Passionately, Deeply,

And Truly. 

She looked like someone I usually wouldn't think about twice

Unless she were to trade the battered paperback for Hegel

Or someone else I couldn't understand.

I don't want what's familiar to me; I ran from the provincial long ago

I know instinctively by watching her

I ran away from everything like her; not towards anything.

She looked happy--comfortable in her own skin--it alarms me to think she actually was.

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