An expensive and expansive view
Takes in the boulevard and sea,
The amethystine splendor in the new
But turbid testament
of day.
Out there, the dolphins dive in play
And whales track out an odyssey,
Traced by daft Ahab as he prays
The gods of vengeance to betray
More than the blubber of the man’s fate:
The horror in the universe
Hunted by man with harpooned hate,
Swamping him with a fatal curse
Down to the lockers of the reefs,
That spawn the coralled
mysteries
Beyond man’s passions and his griefs,
Unheard by indifferent galaxies.
I am no Melville and this poem
Is overblown with more than spray
That scuds upon this lyric’s form
Into the amethystine lights of day.
And here along this boulevard,
The pedicabs, and the dust
Stirs at the hurry of the wards
Whose poverty beds with lust
To multiply the miseries
Hiving in houses by the beach.
I am appalled. Immensities
Loom far out of my mortal reach.
Only this poem, the testament
Of one man’s pain, will remain when gull
Shrieks at the rubble, black and bent
The final debacle of all!
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