Still I Remain Tied to the Mast

Philippe Caza - The Inner Ear(1981)

And it is so:
That beside the path bloom flowers of alien design.
Flowers of pattern intricate and purpose apparently benign
Nanoscopic conversion-engines that eat all your words
And in exhaust fumes minute expel them as hope.
To be inhaled through the nostrils of a brave new morning

And they say:
Don’t step on the flowers daddy; look where you walking
Please let me see the wonders of which you’re talking
Love and experience the world and its ways
Night and its ghosts and the living of days
Don’t blow it away on the roll of loaded dice
And sentence us all to the layers of ice
That will float in the glass of the swirling galaxy
Shaken not perturbed by the return to normalcy
Spinning on without noticing the global catastrophe
That left no full stop no exclamation or apostrophe
That unimaginable void for the human mind to ponder
That ultimate zero the end of all wonder

And as for me:
I will bite back these tears
That well in my foolish boy heart
that bypass all of my portentous fears
and tug at the place where the regrets start
the place where I am born, where your beauty is made
the place that struggles with power’s slow fade
For nostalgia that eats like rust on the bone
Of a homesick fool for a land not his own
I’ll fall from that narrow path into your arms
And there will I rest ‘till the storm water calms