People Were Beautiful Once

People were beautiful once, I think

while saving seeds after the harvest

while creating constellations beneath a purpled sky gorgeous as consciousness

while breaking open honey mead to share in a celebration of life's victories and defeats.

They got diseased by nationalisms aping words through the mechanical mouthpiece

where desire once held court, they got wretched by payments of sales tax,

they got distorted by television ads selling vagina cream.

They got filled with messaianic delusions pointing to the death of the beloved,

they got deluded by a sequence of images that once seemed gorgeous until it became overplayed.

People were beautiful once I think

when the reason d etre of youth operated in glowing hums the color of living ghosts

when our pulsating palms touched amid the thin tallow of leafs on the vine

when we sang of love over the dollar and harmonized the fruits of our minds with the demands of the times.

People were noble once, people were graceful

not disproportioned in poverty, waiting in a stinking welfare line for the right to go to the grocery store, not saving up dimes for diaper money, not yelling in the street during the heighth of anger caused by a general misunderstanding caused by a dead life.

People had tragedies, people had successes.

Now people got news the color of a clock radio glaring in monotone speech upon the disserations of upper class rhetoric as paltry thin of emotion as grapefruit rind and with an underlying bitterness

Now people get kicked out of employment with no one to welcome them home

People lose their lives in car accidents that go unnoted by the mystified machinations of history piling up court cases and elections against the acts of selflessness taking place in the backrooms of foreclosed houses, people lose their lives to drink, people lose their lives to the plague of cancer

and we don't thank them for their hard work, even after they're gone. They could have said of any of the dead that he was a good grocer that she was a noble office assistant, they could have done anything to enoble the two natural instances that occurs in this commodity maze, that of death and birth but hey we care more about cars in this country as is evidenced by the amount of airtime they get than the humble artists who wear dirty socks, then the machinist who lost a finger, then the teacher who lost their mind.

People were beautiful once, I think

eating plums and mangos in the luminous air

laughing over pointless contests that were feats of skill

delving into the nature of the universe as one discusses a book.

Yes, people were beautiful once

dressed in handmade clothing

and pouring water into troughs for farm animals

discussing actual topics instead of falling into a socially hypnotized paucity of meaning where everything is accepted despite its being out of context.

Yes people invented beauty

to describe the inner parts of themselves that resonated with the reeds of the river

and the ghost face present in the moon glowering through the fog of evening,

people invented beauty to have something fine in which to align the motions of themselves

but now it is illegal, subversive, a rebellion of the heart

to walk through America's corporate towns and cities, looking for a flower of a face

in which to cradle in the arms of the mind. We lost our portraits, our statues, our mirrors

and bought up all the cheap costumes we could find just to feel important in our own minor way and it is almost beautiful the way it is so reasonable but yet there is an old sadness

the age of the relationship between our eyes and the stars

that insists we swam among such asterisms once in the velvet of nature's vestige

that ensconced us with slow supple travels amid the lucent green of forests made to be inhabited by people without machines.

Yes, people were beautiful once.