** Based on Allan Ginsberg's "Scream"
Tears
In a world where life is hopeless, sad, confusing, frantic, lost, dragging with it,
a juxtaposed reality and isolation,
I watch in grim participation among those uncaring, those unknowing,
those unthinking,
hoping that imagination become one with verity, hoping for escape, hoping for essence,
hoping, hoping, hoping,
riding the roller-coaster of torment, with turns of fury, rises of benevolence, loops of hysteria,
drops of woe, as fast as the Earth travelling through the infinite void that is regarded with
obliviousness, flying into the sky among the birds and the clouds, rising, rising, then
lawfully abides nature, finally slamming into the cold, hard, pavement,
where people trample, rape, and kill, kill, kill that which sustains, always barbaric, brutal,
callous, unrelenting, ruthless, tyrannical, heartless,
where nature abhors a human, trust becomes fear, hate, old friends distance, one sedentary, one
itinerant, avoiding and alienating,
where civil warfare of peoples, their color, their color, their color, all must be one with the
collective, life-given privileges discarded, uphold the prevarication, to hell with beliefs,
thought, freedom,
where society yells and I yield, blatant "standards" jabbing and hooking the sweet children
whose minds malleable, their guardians ignorant of their role in the hive, having not read
their scripts, sculptors playing Catch with his and her clay, identity crisis,
where ignorance and arrogance prevails, countries quarrelling in their "respective" corners, flight
of fleeting fullness, forgetting the experience of the world, forever dim and faltering, with
flagellant frigidness to community, profit, profit, profit, gimme, gimme, gimme,
where thoughtless skirmishes drink the wine of hate, war booms the ground, the mind tabula
rasa, death conquers all, blind, deaf, and mute, asking "Where are the children," eating
bitter to slay the bird, daggers fall, bullets fly, giants felled, amnesiac,
where diminished is life, and life is diminished, value becomes price, hate becomes home,
monotony colonizing, death a best friend, damn it,
I ask "Why must we be victims of life?", "Where are we?", "Why?", "Why?", "Why?!", roar until the river subsides.
© by Raymond Tong, 28 April 1997