Friday, August 29, 2008

Ambassador Yenin

1/
I should like to take a bow and explain: no, this was not how I meant it. It is rather the case the children you mention
are not removed, but gone, and not returning, as you've heard, from this situation of going, but, with a
brightness unimagined, conducted calmly from the future.

2/
When faced with such simplifying forces, it is often best to apologize. And then, like ripples returning to
compose a central grace, retract more than was enriched in the gesture.

3/
My friend, I am sorry.

4/
In negative stead of our great country, there have been many naysayers; nags; rattlers on the throat;
bursting more often than not with the vitality of a summer confessional. You must trust me when I
say, my friend, they are only correct because they explain nothing. Have any of them dared to visit
the least of our villages without a camera, in the buff, so to speak? Have their foreign correspondents
even once thrown the poltergeist from preconception, protested the tendency to haunt so neatly, nefarious to
invest in the plainest happy residents of things before them? No, I doubt they have the eyes for acceptance.

5/
Poverty. Can one devise a correlate? Showroom hopelessness. They see and say what they write. This
we cannot help. Such is the curse they bring us into, and report from.

6/
Yes, much pride. I will tell you. Our vernal core, rubeberry thickets, the flux of pheasants among
grasses; what more? the knees-beneath-bedsheets effect of cloudshadows flowing over foothills. These are the spirit
of reality. Where the millwheel revolves, water brings rings to bear. An old saying. Mountain-strong, any stream, I invite you friend, out of
mind and memory of that place, to pick one. It will curl you into a stronger representative embrace. The
aim of our creed and our legistators' tempered confluence, has always been that we, people of such a land, would
in our lifeways and means of being plain, aspire to be indistinguishable
from them.

7/
Any charges, rumors without a respect for borders, are often, more than likely, distortions. But these are
men who know how to devour one mother above all others. Trust not. The tourism on them is always thinking.

8/
You have heard, I am sure, of the thousand-plus laborers sealed like close-sliding fish in a
mass ditch
in Yenlo. Or, even more popular among our enemies, of breadlines that taper from city to city. And as a
typical compliment to irresponsible, groundless conjectures, one often hears reports sprout from the
mouths of cowards--that leadership is an elite in the worst manner, massaging bought girls with champagne
before cresting blonde tresses over pillows stuffed not with sawdust, but sweetbread. We must never admit
fantasies among table manners. I hope you should agree.

9/
Of course there is a concern for credentials. Who is this who would speak, without reservation, to convince me?
In answer to that, as with any matter of small-time immediacy, I would have you, my lungs my
recipient, my comrade quiet inside the hour, open all that was given you at birth and look at me. Out of freshness
of affection and with your own friendliness, would this shared stranger deceive you, to defy cleanly?

2 comments:

yogacephalus said...

Steve--Have you ever read Albert Goldbarth? The complaint at the core of "Ballad" seems to be calling for an AG kind of poet.

Ahab Cloud said...

Step 4 (above) makes a mighty point.