The Wasteland Suicides – Part 5

		5.

After the search for sunlight
and continuance
someone to hold onto
in the dark we're so scared of
The sun has set
The day has gone
We who were once moving
Once searching
Are now stopped and stilled

Here there is no movement
Here there is no light
Only torment and the call in the darkness
Each soul to each:  Will you fill my emptiness?
Will you be my sun when the sun has faded?
There is no one else to go on
When we have stopped
No one knows the way
All are lost and none are found
The shepherd gathers his ninety nine
What would you give to be lost
The last who searched but never found
The hiddenness behind the hills.

	If there were someone
	Who knew the way
	One more road
	Less traveled by
	We could continue
	Stepping
	Cycling
	Our children going on
	When we cannot
	But there is no one
	No road

Do you know where you're going to?
Does that man who walks beside the road know?
Ask him if he knows the way, the truth about life
And we will all follow.
Does he know?

This is the idea of love the idea of sex
my contract to you is that I will love you
until I don't feel like it anymore
and then we'll stay together for the children
Of the 10 couples who married today,
five will get divorced.  Of these five
more than half will report that they share
little or no intimacy.
I love you and I want to marry you because 
people marry and we have to marry and
I want to have sex with you
My body needs you
my mind could care less
I love you

really
I do

	A woman stepped out of a bar
Her body clad in skin tight masculinity
And the sun laughed in the bright red light
Seeing us chained to the wheel
Her body in torment dancing
Dance, dance wherever you may be
On the spoke; torment our offering
but you don't have to dance with somebody

	Too long looking at the sun
turning away the red light is faded
to the colorblind all lights mean go
You don't know until you try
Somewhere a wild sweet trumpet calls
the sun goes down
the stone crumbles and the trolls come forth
blinking

Dearly beloved
we are gathered here today to witness
the marriage of these two people.
Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife
Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD: Submit yourselves therefore.
Who am I and whose am I?  Sometimes I wander in the dark
Wondering where you are and how I got so far downtown
Lost in the red light district looking for someone
Who could give me what you have never stopped offering
But I refused.
TO LOVE AND TO CHERISH:  I have seen men seated in their
High and lofty towers, counting their money and pasting it
In books for what it is to have and what it will be worth.
And I have seen their wives wishing dandelion seeds could
Conceive their love as easily as human seed destroys it.
TO HONOR:  Does Queen Elizabeth II's husband address her as:
Your Majesty, Elizabeth, Bess or Queenie?  How easy is it
To marry when everyone is inevitably below you?
FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE:  At the end of the 125 miles,
I fell off my bike and you laughed.  You'd been there two hours
And were wondering if I'd died.  I dumped my water bottle
Over your head and we made love in the grass.
FOR RICHER OR FOR POORER:  In 1929, you jumped from
The window of the Waldorf Astoria.  In 1935 I caught you
Still drifting down and we had tea in Timberline Lodge.
IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH:  I passed through a ward of
Cancer victims and envied them their health, still speaking
Still walking.  Next door a man raised up his eyes to me
And turned away, his Eve corrupted and legless.
TILL DEATH DO YOU PART?  I do.  I do.  Forever and ever
							AMEN

I sat in the grass next to my bicycle
and the sun laughed.
"Where are you going?"
"Where are you going?" I replied.
"Can you follow me
 through skipping shadows
 can you still a moment
 and choose a path
 not ordained for you?"

I look up into the hills
whence cometh my love.
He comes
and the wheel has been loosed
O Sun lay aside your chains
and join us
we are free

til death do us part
			amen

********** This is the end of The Wasteland Suicides poem. **********