This one is about 'contentedly' making myself attend an assembly. It's a joyous and above all happifying poem.
This is my prisoner
His miserable servility is an imperial victory
Of prophecy over humanity and a tragic godless history
I read his other-racial features
Its hidden agonies and grubby captive gratitude
But we are different, as I am ordained his superior
I push this creature on
In to the pleasant furnace of droning lobby hubbub
To complicit admiration from some casual observers
The PA scuffs and stutters about eating-time and seating
But the call goes unheeded like any other failed climax
In a marriage of consumers
Vacant washroom music
Its pine-scented morality automatically engages
Evoking easy semi-detached, yet colonial orderliness
First names bounce about, off beaming fronts
Ties help, without helping, the heels and tights that chat
And gather their young
Past a cloud of youths, pulsating with suppressed eruptions
Their bi-tonal calls compete in normalcy and righteousness,
And indivisible dualities
I march this besuited body
Towards a pre-assigned post, to become a human shield
Against the pitiless barrages of perfunctory, hapless ideology
But he flags among the names
So forcing our route with Paul's stoic resolve
I lead my now-smiling captive, though I am losing the way
Thickets of dressed limbs and gray-cased automata
These un-lost cramp my movement, and pausing to breathe
I find I am lost and purposeless
In an instant of spirit and flesh, we have become one man
I pant, war-worn, while he drinks plastic, placid sentiment
We are victors and victims.
Turning, I see him easy-bantering with well-meaning indifference
Among the inessential classes, my grinning captor advances
And drives me grateful onward.
Into a luscious meadow of oh-so-skeptical doubtfulness
Sown with unreasoning grasses which 'can't all be wrong'
And calms my spirit for the battle.
philo