Incantation When then may we return to the rat races of old, the tepid coffees, subway squeeze, smiling faces on magazines, newspapers for a dime, and sit on the porch enjoying an evening breeze. Get you vaccines, get your boosters! Don’t you wish to have a future? Covid is out and running freely and thus we may not. I love mandates, I love pickles and peanut-butter popsicles. It’s cold out here and I’m freezing, but since you like my song put something in the bucket, Don’t You just pass along. I can tell you’re feeling guilty – so am I. I wasted last year on Youtube and beers but now I’m felling better. Pandemic times have been good to me as you can see with a guitar, I’m making a musical living. City people slow down look down at the ground– and don’t need to keep to a schedule. I once had a Porsche. I enjoyed it of course but I found it lacking in horse-power, so I drove it a while then went down to the coast to trade up to a Lamborginni. The very best job which I ever had was in the third year of Obama; I remember it well I believe it was Fall– delivering sandwiches to strangers. But late at night if the stars were right, is someone was late and had already paid, I might be left after work with one to take home and eat. Baker, trucker, warehouse help, plaster applicator, salesman, cleaner, or fast-food cook, now I can only fondly sigh for all that might have been. Shall we have a blue new year, full of media cheer, avoiding all consternation? If your life is like mine you should do just fine. I got this pair at K-Mart. Yes, it feels warm and lasts a long time, aisle 43. I love mandates, I love pickles and peanut-butter popsicles. Get you vaccines and your boosters. Covid is out and running about and so we may not.
Tramping through this preserve of emperors, allowing it its quiet-times only at nightfall, what do we assert? A strange democracy? –As if in some middling wood we await expectantly the return of kings who may never come. But gript by piety, else holding tight to a line linking to past pieties, or hoping that hope in history is piety enough, or practicing reverence with the occasional electrical worship of the present instant, we wait. But Hitler had his blueprints as well, working with them to the end. Who doesn’t. This poem is my blueprint–blank till I sketch a first small suggestive design in pen here between the phrases, and ask the reader or passerby to draw also, to imaginatively doodle, to add. Then, pass this day-poem along to others and it might becomes a complete set of drawings, public petition for a newer city which is practical, less elusive, less remote.
A pdf with words (in Chinese)
and the tune (modified for two voices...)
[public domain if written credit is given (P.Kragt) for commercial use]
When ducks arrive in the city it may be under duress, and all unprepared for city tastes or city etiquette; These have not each been asked for their consideration. When artists commute from the countryside F complaining of meagre result, rural simplicity, spotty esteem; neither (perhaps) have those been petitioned for preference. When the lone scribe returns to his country under foreign decree-To rebuild, to replace some walls and re-make what was; Little as well might he/she relish that opportunity.
One lonely robin waits dissolution of snowfall as we anticipate another political season. In winter they assemble in large flocks at night, in Canada no doubt, but here with civic vest, with civil etiquette the robin has a regular welcome won upon our level greens. Other dinosaur descendants must flit, yet, and hop from our right-of-way (as lesser mammals fled in turn at the tramp of raptors) but she need not scurry at all. Might I predict a day- scenting the dry and balmy breezes of a summer afternoon, tired of its subterranean toil, when one overly lugubrious earthworm, wishing but to take in a little sun amid a forest of close-kept American grasses, shall find itself, too late, as a trophy; fodder to the new iteration of robin. Why is it that sportsmen employ the robin as mascot so seldom unless it is inappropriate to limit a living myth so..?
The solitary starling passed me on my left hurriedly searching for a twilight roost; else a recent convert to Americanism, he/she changed now, aligned with human values, separate from its flock yet indistinguishable from the rest.