The clock tower is stuffed with cotton.
The lean times have gone
And there's work to be done.
You can face the sea with everything reachable
That time can give a value to,
Your valuable time,
Small consolation for the indignant hammer of bells,
The cloying gong, the empty revelry of pain sounding
Keeping the fish still,
Clanging with history as vindication,
Holding our disturbance in pregnant air.
Now, you treat history with noblesse obligée,
Sip martinis, ravish cocaine, read Rimbaud in the hot tub
Behind the bar while Tuff Gong skanks on the CD.
There's a Haitian art gallery across the street from where
A lunatic gimcrack collector used to sell me wax lips and
Plastic alligator jaws full of bubble gum.
A boy delivers the town newspaper in a Volvo.
Most of the old fishermen are in jail now for smuggling drugs.
A seagull commutes out to the distant islands,
Not staying to accompany the bells
That are not ringing under the stars.
Helicopters would swoop down with their roto-blades
To whip up a wake against the current,
A reverberation to slap meaningless grey rock
And roll back like the lean times along the gravel.
The harbor blues descend, through intermediate oranges,
People in boats hoot, in unison, their alarms
Off-key, the distortion of private pains
In a conglomerate of paranoid honks and shameless dissatisfaction
At their daily spraying like insecticide out into the world.
They shriek for the free fireworks,
Continuing their pursuit of a candy beyond all candy.
Even in this paradise green, the wide-lipped bay,
The sound of conflict brings in the darkness,
Sirens must come in before the triggers are dimmed.
Feeble colors strafe the charcoal horizon.
The beating is as tribal as pain ever gets.
A whirlwind of inconclusion
Eddies to a close.
The absence in the wake of the bells sounds.
