i will sing a soft song of farewell

by Ron Whitehead

Twain Whitehead Cat by Jinn Bug

I wander dirt backroads, singing songs, my dog Rags at my side.
How often is belief the illusion of an illusion, a false premise
based on an assumed notion. Take your moral judgment
and build your haunted hell, filled with singing flagellants.
Your conscience is a figment of your own lack of imagination,
the wind ridden shell of a deserted building.

In the beginning, when I was a boy, we agreed on everything,
because I didn't know any better, because I had been raised
and indoctrinated in prim and proper ways. That's clear.
Now I wince at those words. I wince at the thought
of your judgment. I will never dwell in that haunted hell.
I will never be where I began. I have long walked my own way.

Hollow eyes. Graveyard teeth. A missing ear.
And yet every Spring graveyards flower daffodils.
I am a poet, a fractal of and in this world.
I am crystal growth, fluid turbulence, galaxy formation.

I float high above unpopulated beaches.
One day the beaches are packed with people.
The next day not one person goes there.
That's when I arrive.

We are all immigrants invading indigenous lands.
Not invaders nor farmers anymore.
The small farms were swallowed whole by corporations.

Now we are the dust of dreams.
Now we are barely audible energy echoes.

What gives anyone the right to deprive life
of poetry, of dreams, of the unknown, of mysticism.
What is truth? Do you know?
Do you shape what you think truth is
so it looks like what you want to see?

We move forward by the aid of symbols
and we change those symbols
as we move forward.

Are you still hoping to discover what truth is?
Well don't waste your time calling
502-396-5141. That's my old number.
That train done left the station.

And what makes you think I have
the answers to anything anyway?
Or anybody else on this planet?

And now it's raining. No, it's pouring,
but my umbrella is broken.
So I sit on the deep cushioned green couch,
staring out my writing cottage window,
listening, and all I hear is the wind
whispering through green pine needles
and rain on battered blue tin,
while dreaming dreaming dreaming
about the nature of reality,
about the meaning of life.

I sit in wonder, in a state of gratitude for this
beautifully strange life I have born myself into.

In old age I have discovered a kindness,
a soft and gentle smile in my soul.
Having finally thrown off the shackles
of civilization and its endless discontents
I have rediscovered the wide eyed wonder
I knew as a boy. I am whole again.
Vestiges of bitterness have slipped away.
Today my blue healers and I will take three walks,
the last one, near dark, will wind along
the banks of the oh great river, below the falls.
And when my dying time arrives
I will sing a soft song of farewell.

Ron Whitehead, U.S. National Lifetime Beat Poet Laureate

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