Liberties

To me moans came for food, my roars poured forth like drink. – John Berryman, “Job” “So why did my umbilicus, umbrella of the belly, not asphyxiate and fix me at my birth                  and make my due my expiration date?  Why was I lapped in aprons, and not limbo’s fair-welled, farewell wave;                   why was I milk-fed, milk-toothed, given weight?  Better end here unborn: then I’d shut the hell up;                   then I would snooze all my alarm  at all the hedge-funds who so priveted and so deprived the world,                  who drilled a black yet golden heaven from the deadened graves,  and all the highnesses who built a pyramid of buried complexes                   on pyramids of schemes.  Or why was I not canned like laughter or an unexpected baby,                   my metaphysic offal cured in sewage?  There the stranded heartbeat of the world’s unquickened by desiring,                   the tired sleep in forever.  There the mountains range, the sundials of wild granite,                   and sun sets like a dodgy jelly.  And the thimble and the Brunelleschi dome alike are there, alike,                   and corners are the only cornered things.    Why is a light given to who is darkness,                  life to whose long life seems lifeless,  who, meeting the business end of time, if it returned his holy texts,                   would