Earth-Bound

".....but when I became a man, I put away childish things."---Cor. 13:11

Those who have dreams to spare,
Let them sleep;
And those who still have the heartTo hope,
Let those brave hearts beat.

For when I was a child,
I dreamt as a child;
Just a minor
Wish for a minor

Age.

An age
When the furthest flight imagination took
Was to take the bus
Alone,
Or perhaps, to be tall enough to reach
Beyond its ceiling hatch,
And catch
The passing clouds
And to hold the railing bars
Some grown-ups forsook
For a lower resting place.

They seemed further away
From where I sat;
I suppose I didn't know then that
The young woke to a different dawn
And slept to a different night,
With unadulterated sight,
Looked up and saw very different skies
From peerless, ripened eyes.

So I stood, instead,
To my mother's despair
No spanked seat
Could make me trade
My tortured feet for a tortured chair.

Well I don't draw clouds in the sky
Anymore,
There's not much sky left--
For above and beneath the steam,
Some stonecold form,
Another's Dream,
Made its loft
Up high--
Just leave me with my stainless steel straws.

You can't see much in the dark
Anyway,
The skylights' closed, so the sky's light fades
We men, in our wisdom, decided
To keep tomorrow's rain out
Today. Only the sleeping and the dead
Won't know it's a hundred and four in the shade
And that the sun's still outside, stark
Naked, rubbing shoulders with us in the bus, everyday.

I stand, incensed, instead,
In my sweated bliss
I don't know how long
I can stand

All this.

by Lee Kin Mun
aka mr brown
June 1987
(Copyright 1987)