The City

I need clarity from the clouds that shroud
My mind with a dense dim sedating fog.
Everyday I waft, a muted light in the impenetrable crowd,
Face draped thickly in stodgy city smog.

I need to scrub my skin raw of tarry oil that clings
Like asphyxiating plastic to my pores,
Squeezing me like a clammy cloth, it wrings
And clenches and clutches out every drop from my core.

I need to sip in crisp cool simplicity,
But this ash and soot sucks me shriveled,
Another crack beneath a collossal concrete duplicity,
Pounded to a fine dust like flour being milled.

I need to splash my face from its dopey complicity,
Smoked and salted in a dizzy daze.
Our flames made sluggish by the city,
Spinning, lightheaded in an endless maze.

I need the sweet sweeping singularity of a singing songbird,
To strip the humdrum buzzing hull,
The monotonous metropolis whose grease-smeared cogs it herds,
On and on in a smouldering, slogging, grinding lull.

I catch myself before the smoke chokes and my hairs cinge and sear,
And find myself here, away, sprawling by a stream,
Grime washed from skin, translucent as the river clear.
My soul savors to behold, receptacle cleaned pristine.

A peace befalls me as a lake laps lightly and licks my lolling feet;
A light leaks through soft fingertips;
Rippled wet clay a cool retreat;
An elated purple fragrance that circles, lingers and sits.

I rest and absorb a gorge most immaculate:
Unwaveringly braving charged tempests,
Loud yet whispering quiet, a proud and protecting power in it.
Loyal light intensifies and magnifies its height limitless.

To be stolid like that silver high sliver in the night sky,
Steadfast in its solid circling motions above vast oceans,
Tipping like the tide, yet eternal unchanged guide,
Confident in its convictions, realizing no restrictions.

Oh if my limbs could leap and my soul’s hymns peak
As they were born to, as the innominate storms do,
As the heightening of the roaring beat, as the lightning on the soaring peak;
If boundless I grew, and groundless I flew.

Now, slowly, the lines of my mind seem to find
And hark the sharpness of that stark sierra:
Stretching and sure it winds, to sapient space it binds,
And assume the rapid urging certainty of the surging swells of its riviera.

I listen and latch to sounds decisive in their prerogative above grounded thatch,
Whispering and whirling, crisp breeze unfurling,
Ingenuity is hatched, a continuity unmatched,
And the matriarch ever-sterling, in its certainty hurtling.

New life breathes, new ideas conceived,
The lift of fresh wings, a gift of its birth,
It darts round and teases with mirth unbound, released,
As a sprightly sprig bursts through nursing earth.

A drumming circle hums, voices greater than their sum,
An energy presses on, a synergy pulls along,
An assuring croon together, to the moon and enduring sun,
A rising symphony of song, a high epiphany to belong.

Cherub-like prancing of dancing leaves,
Rustling freely in the bustling wind
Atop a worryless, gleeful, carefree tree.
Nothing to hinder, nothing to bind, just awoken and truly open.

How can I return, now satiated?
How my spirit resonated,
How my fingers created,
How my soul elated.
Now to abate,
As I spin and gyrate,
Myself to sedate,
My hands to serrate.

Now back to factory fumes.
Duty-bound to take my place.
I am again consumed,
Another wheel I turn in haste.

Hammering, sweating, sweltering,
I trudge on, solemn.
Trod in queue, turning and melting,
Keep moving, single column. 

An angry face as I slow the line,
With thoughts of yesterday so sublime.
As the steam engine presses on,
The free peregrine is long gone.