7a.
Energy, health, physics do not matter; he's
More concerned with how his boyhood flowered.
His life is run on tiny batteries:
How else could such a paradox be powered?
How else a brave heart could be such a coward?
7b.
He cannot keep the music out of mind:
A Gurdjieff quiet never seems to fall.
Slim peace is shredded serially by cosmic
Noise behind his eyes and brutal grind
Without—how can he know and be at all?
7c.
How mad we are to daily tilt with streams
Of incident that warp this culture fast
To atrophy, hew the good deeds down, cleave hilasmic
Hopes of simple people into rhymes
Of cheese logs, wells of greed, drained
Blank mortifications leading at last
To death's turnstile; the sheen
Of life disused rubs off, stained.
(Life's oxygen erodes the spring of cork.)
7d.
A beat of wings, a beat of skin, thin dreams
Stretched: drumhead parallels the heart, green
With joy, but steers it on a separate fork
Off course, into the dunbrown culvert, a mud
Of splintered bone, a common slough of blood
And air.
