From Alternative Prosaicnesses: First Poems
published by Down With Grundy, Publisher
(now Banana-Cue Books, Publisher)

Throwing One's Weight Around

 

It's all spread before me
the here and seen geography --
         tropical sun and vegetation,
         unusual to the soul
         yet familiar to feelings.
Such familiarities often
         fade to uncaring -- to
         boredom and, consequence
                 of which is
                 hatred and rebellion
                 Deviancy
         is not absent in
any culture, due to
         this
imprisoning by the
         land within certain knowing
         and certain unknowing or,
         worse, must never knows.
I desire a walk as free as
         Whitman's -- tell
the tundra as much as the
         rainforest, the polar regions
         the seas as well as the
                 land's ranges!
I desire elopement with my
         rebellion to
         some
distant, echoing reefs
         and caverns
where I can sing to myself as one w/
         vegetations -- no
Asia or Africa
and where I am the land itself,
         not necessarily ruler.

tourists pay tickets
for a change of
         weather --
more telling of them than
         the local manner
Now who can blame you
         who've seen the love and yet
         been wrung
                 violently
                 subtly
                 subconsciously
                 by more influences than
         you're blaming the local
         media with,
and who can blame them

         they're blaming the
                 "system,"
         now who can
blame it -- the ultimate
         institution, culture
if it's the amalgam,
the nation itself,
         its conventional
         wisdom

thinking the world flat . . .
Yeah: tourists pay tickets
if only to take back some
         of the remnants
         of the
                 former freedom

but, look -- even in Africa
is an absent safari!

 

Copyright © 1999, 2001 Vicente-Ignacio Soria de Veyra. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

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