Stream of Consciousness Saturday: Pretty…

I know: I’ll write something fairly long. Not just pretty long, but really quite long – long enough at least that a few gems can be buried safely in the no-man’s land in the middle, where only the die-hards will find them – yes, long enough that maybe even those self-same die-hards will be too beleaguered at that middling point to take any note to speak of. Of the gems. So. I’ll need a nice slow spiral-in of rhyme-y poetry fit to tire and mire even the most dedicated. Then, a couple paragraphs disguised as prose, in which to stash my gems. And, finally, a gradual grading of more good old rhymes sliding slippery-ly outward again to the finish. Aye…

Not-knowing is nothing; I’m well-used to not-knowing

Why or which-way, even, a given breeze may be blowing

For I’m not one to keep abreast of any given recent event

And my ignorance extends well beyond the current moment

Billowing in great blank clouds back into history

To shroud peaceful progress and war-time victory

Alike all in mystery, all in unknown unknowns

Until the very fabric of the human tapestry groans,

“How can you be so little aware of me?”

Still, I’ll not strain my eyes to see

Any but a few of the whats, wheres and whos

Which mill-grind like grist in each night’s news

And nor will I memorize many names and dates

From graves, from tomes, from the commemorative plates

Mounted in rows along the walls of these catacombs I wander

No! And neither will I pause to ponder

Whether each passage I’ve before passed

But will limp along in worn circles until I come at last

To a way out, or is it to be further in

As begins,

Perhaps, another form or forum in which the so-called facts may make their attempts to manifest and to assert some authority over the whole what-has-gone-before of things… Yet I resist! So snug in the proverbial sand is my whole head fixed, it picks up nearly none of the who-said-what and when and wherefore. I’ll never know why we’re still at war! I won’t comprehend the old men’s maneuverings with their money. It’s all beyond me.

Why, even my personal history I don’t deign to know, why to any place I’ve been I did go, what there I did or even now here do, and again, again, for everloving pete’s sake, why; almost all manages to elude me when I even try to recall. Oh, once and for all, I am! There’s a fact. Needs one more? Is it not enough to have one’s own witness bore? I know I am; it’s nigh all I can keep in this noggin of mine that’s so like a sieve of holes through which all else flows

Down and away, leaving nary a trace

Save the lines growing on my aging face

Which yet retains a certain boyishness

As if the not-knowing may be that bliss

Imbibed by finders of the youth fountain

Unlike bone-dry miners of truth’s mountain

Yea – another dram of not-knowing for your

Humble, numb, nimble, nothing-knower

And, if you please, a lull-a-bye festooned

With breaking boughs, cows hurtling the moon

And other bits of pretty stuff and nonsense

To chock my in-other-wise vacant present tense

Full of words which don’t bother to mean

Anything beyond their shimmery sheen

As I’m sent into the sort of slumber

Familiar only to we who can number

The things we know with just the toes

Of one foot, while those

We don’t know

Necessarily go

Uncounted