Written while sitting in a rusty jeep in the thick of a traffic jam that was bad enough for me to whip out my phone and start writing.
Welcome to modern hell,
the sounds and smells of
Hadean urbanity.
Welcome to the land of
promise and the land
of asthma, of gases, germs,
of jeepneys—hour-long rides!—
of furious, crazy
taxis, and of tricycles
which whir and wheeze their way
through tightest alleys
and up sweaty, arduous slopes,
of bad traffic jams
enough to make a
demon out of saintliest
bishops and ministers
and worse devils
of those who already are.
This is the realm in which
temples are huge, built
to displace plywood shanties,
temples for ancient gods
dressed in tuxedos,
sporting Ray-Ban sunglasses,
shrines for insatiable
deities of the
world of infinite matter.
They even hold masses
for masses perplexed
by their two-faced religion,
religion of a dead world
and religion of
another no less lifeless.
Burnt-out hearts seeking to
burn themselves some more—
the burning out of the soul—
walking on burnt paved
ground or driving cars
to earn to die for paychecks.
Edifices of wood
and hoary towers
of bright glistening concrete
lie uncomfortable
together so that
sidewalks span eight decades.
It is telling that the
cracked pavement and the
rotting, rotted acacia-
wood can't simply be glossed
over. They are the
inheritance of
contemporaneity,
of the age of today,
which never slumbers
and thereby murders itself,
and demands a rest which
isn't.
This, my world, is a fact,
my milieu, the air I
breathe, the air that crushes me,
and which I cannot crush
but have to succumb
to and breathe and breathe and breathe
because there is still life
in the oxygen
of the city and what can
you do? You are flesh, frail,
ashy, ashen flesh.
You have a body which grows
in pain. The world's soul
groans with sorrow
for the hell it has become.
But
that's why we pray "Thy kingdom come, Thy will
be done on Earth as it is in heaven",
isn't it?
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