"If you serve time for society, democracy, and the other things quite young, and declining any further enlistment make yourself responsible only to your self, you exchange the pleasant, comforting stench of comrades for something you can never feel in any other way than by yourself. That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally that you have written in that way ... and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man ... and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against the one single, lasting thing – the stream." — Ernest Hemmingway, The Green Hills of Africa
The condom and the jellyfish
met floating side-by-side.
One came down with the river while
one swam in with the tide.
There in the estuary they
had matters to decide.
It seems that by this stream which flows
thru Washington, D. C.
A black hole having five sides eats
whatever it can see
supplied by all three branches of
U.S. Bureaucracy.
The condom said it knew of "love"
at least the kind for sale,
consumed by those Americans
who play at war, then fail.
Ejaculation premature:
a timeless tawdry tale.
The jellyfish found this absurd:
that love would find success.
For it had sailed upon the sea
and knew vast carelessness:
The waves, like War, could hardly care
who made a bloody mess.
"How many sides has Gog?" some ask
who bask in Revelation.
Apocalypse or End of Days
requires intense fixation:
acute self-neutered intellect;
Inquisitive Castration.
The Jellyfish at last swam on
Upstream against the flow.
The condom let the current tell
it when and where to go:
a symbol of America
which has no wish to know.
Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright © 2021