The Wheatfields East of Eden

They say money can’t buy happiness, I guess
But it can buy half of it, I bet.
A down payment for a dream
That someday far from now, may gleam
In portraits of dead silhouettes
That crept around the room, and sat
The paintings in their prisons wept.

The paintings of old, dying clowns,
With caked on makeup, penciled frowns
This ruse that they all use
To hide what lies behind the eyes,
the lies, the shows, the desolate rows
The shame is broken when the face
Comes to the surface when embraced
and a counterfeit replaced
What once was wounded in its place.

When the real face was revealed,
A naked child in madness reeled.
He turned instead to face the wall.
With his back to us, to all.
I’ve walked the stairs so oft to see,
Perchance to catch a glare,
Of all the loved ones never there.
Snow angels in the very shape
Of my Madonna by the lake,
The listless clouds in circles go
Until night time ends the show.

The same old story, line for line,
Indra my classic fountain pen
With tears as inkblots cried.
Blots and spots the page forgot,
The tear-eyed pools of ink have dried.
Until Madonna’s mannequin
Decides to grace the stage again
Before her dreamlike blue gray haze
The pilgrims hit their knees to pray.
Madonna was a mannequin,
In a window at the sidewalk’s end
The same old story, once again,
Cried Indra my fountain pen,
And this is Indra’s net
there tears have long since dried.
And on the page are brushed aside.

If but to be the self must ask,
Should I dare to try, at last,
Surrender to the ghosts of past,
When the moon had shattered so
And awoke our old sun Sol
The evening in her night-robe glows,
As petals from a dust-storm rose.

They all fall when dies the wind
Yet when the day has died again
Another day marched right around
The galleries, the faces, dreams,
Passed by my eye in liquid streams
This gallery of dying dreams
From which a man wakes up
And forgets when dies the day

That moping sun will languid fall
When night’s starlit curtain calls
Sol’s suicide and night is born
The quilt of morn lies scattered, torn.
When mother Earth time’s drain goes down
In an unending silent carousel
Into the ground to sleep, oh well.

Cotton candy, bubble gum
Songs of Sirens, rum tum tum,
Dancing on golden light beams from the sun
Sol, our sun, before we rose,
Narrow danced in silent rows,
Before our fragile race begun,
The moon in silver circles spun.

Here the page has tried to show,
a window through the wall
Go down the silent corridors
Through a labyrinth of halls
Where open is a door, if not,
We are the Children God Forgot.
No direction, not a signal,
No beacon in the night;
Just the hope that someone might,
Someday bathe the path in light.

Full is the pen, hollow the page,
No idea where to start;
Forgot my part while on the stage
And refused to play my part.
I’ve never known a role to play,
And simply ad lib through the days.

One thing is true, that déjà vu,
Indra oft transliterates,
The poet’s soul for you;
They know not why they have to try,
But in the end they do.
If this is ever by some heard,
I’d like to say a couple words:
Objects in the mirror,
Are more beautiful than they appear.

Though darkly through a dusty mirror,
The phantoms in the crowd draw nearer.
I’ve written much, have yet to start,
Trying to audition for some silent background part,
The part whose purpose is to show,
Lyrical letters in shape of a rose.

For the chance to speak when others fall
Dead two feet before the wall.
The fragments shatter,
The dead glass screams—
In reflection a collection
Of disjointed stranger’s gleam.
Their mangled faces on the floor,
Their eyes and ears and mouth, before,
The mirror fell when closed the door.

You are on the other side,
Between me and the great divide
Déjà vu, this doorway to
This moment out of time,
You ask a mirror, ‘Who are you?’
It echoes back the line.
This is but a letter sent
Each line through space and time.

And in this place, this hollow hole,
Where dreams once vibrant have gone cold,
Empathy, the alibi,
The prime suspect—that horrid why.
Out of the sea, onto the beach,
The shadow on the page, who greets
With tired eyes, both bleak and black
The servant’s looking glass is cracked.

The lines now filled, Indra has cried,
His fountain ink pen lullabies,
As butterflies that cannot fly,
Wistful looks into the sky,
In pathetic desperate circle,
It beat it’s one arm bye.
In circles as a carousel,
Such short lived joy is often on sale;
Faces blurred go by in reels
The magic ends when slows the wheel.

The kids file out, and empty feel,
Wearing frowns they got on sale
Through the aisles their dying smiles
Their frowning faces false
They exit through an iron gate
And another group gets on.