Crushing

With a crushing weight on my chest
I enter the crematorium.

Faint moans and screams,
Gaunt women in threadbare cotton shifts,

Long diaphanous hair streaming behind
And a young blond man in full Nazi regalia giving chase.

Mouth open, drooling, his cold blue eyes sparkle.
Entranced! Bewitched! In love!

How do I even know you're here?
Here is a door but no other side

No grass, no birds
No kind or comforting words

Just cell phones and a mean-looking mother’—
His long legs privatizing the aisle.

A girl, about twenty-six months
Looks from face to face

Picking up the world they see--lonely--
On a bus full of people!

She looks; he won't return her gaze.
She pleads

and in her eyes now grows
His look of utter hate returned to him.

He looks for the door
But finds no other side.

To whom it may concern
Her mother laughs and says

"She's so intense!"
Hoping he isn't offended.
He isn't.
He=s broken.

He wobbles to the exit
his heart, like her heart

a chamber
with a door

and a world
inside it struggling

unprepared
as the rest of us.


© 2001, 2017 Dan Goorevitch

Bubbles & Butterflies

You caress the bubble but it doesn't burst.
You squeeze it. It cannot burst. So you eat it

And as it passes out there's a world in there

Not some New York skyline with snowflakes
But a man, yourself, as you should have been.

He is taller than you, stronger than you,
He is warmer, kinder, more generous,

He has a keener intellect, a finer humor
He laughs at himself and accepts his foibles

He is the you you should've been but aren't

So you flush him. But he finds his way out
Of the pipes and into the river where he bubbles up

With millions of other bubbles he heads for the falls.

He falls and stays intact. He wanders up and down
And through all the earth, this homunculus who will outlast you,

Capable of every thing but one:
He cannot free himself from the bubble.

You stand in your living room and a butterfly
Puts his wings between your fingertips

And your feet leave the ground.

At first you laugh but, as your head passes through the ceiling
And you wonder if you're air or plaster, awake or asleep

You fear to let go but you're curious to go on.

You rise up above the clouds, above the stars even
To the untouched waters over heaven

And you find yourself in a pink spiral,

A tunnel. How strange. Above the space, you thought,
There would be more and more space, ever more freedom

But it's a tunnel, and it's narrowing.

The tunnel gets dark and you're afraid to let go
So many miles from home and then you smell the stink.

The stench is appalling but you think it will pass.

It gets worse. You can't let go now. You can only hope
Things will get better. But it gets worse. And it gets hot.

Surely it can't last and if I let go I'll die here

In this heat and this stink, alone. At least I have
Someone with me, the butterfly. But who is this butterfly?

It puts its wings between my fingers. It wanted to take me here!
But I have nothing else and fear to die alone.

So you hold on. The heat gets more intense. It is searing
And then it gets twice as hot. You can't breathe.

Now it's so hot it's beyond heat. You feel ice cold.

The butterfly is letting you down into a burning lake.
The lake is silver, like mercury. Like a volcano

It bubbles. Perfectly round solid bubbles and you see
Either reflected on the outside or inside it (you cannot tell)

A man resting peacefully, each under his own fig tree.
He drops you.

You feel your feet hit something solid, your knees buckle
And instinct makes you reach with both hands to break the fall.

You let go of the butterfly.

You are on your feet, crouching, in the centre of
Your living room. You know, for the first time

The fear and love of God.