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The Finer, Less Real Things
“My many-coloured daisy chain is terribly flimsy,”
Ananda said to the Lord Buddha
and in a vague moment of collapse
the great sage took the sky.
A word like “idea” has led us
to the very stars, while the world,
our mass of contradiction, is celebrated
in so many skyscrapers.
I am satisfied living in a cream tent.
I am framed, and I hang.
The movement towards dispensing with
money will, in times to come, save us.
Between the sea and the moon, imaginary
cows, imaginary people, McDonald’s burgers.
If there was one thing,
would it be?
Sheol
Found somewhere close, a cogent instant,
a chink in the fabric, that gives
my destiny, my quest, a gift.
I can absorb the waking fires
better now, and distil from each first
warm attempted seduction the essence
of its validity. For mistake not,
the incessant gnawing at my heart,
the anodyne I take to dull its pain,
is an intrinsic consequence of
the wayward language of flesh.
Bertolt Brecht stole
a black wheelbarrow
from the devil
and
filled it with potatoes
Under the earth, traces of day.
Under the earth, bones without souls.
Under the earth, the view
of Sheol, the memories become promises.
Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke is an Australian poet who lives in Canberra in the Australian
Capital Territory. His third chapbook, Three Hundred and Sixty-four Paper Boats, is forthcoming from Pudding House.
Email: Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke
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