[the poetry billboard] - 'Beyond Consolation' by Eric Chaet
 
 
Beyond Consolation

Eric Chaet

Recalling how I sometimes quit rather than be party to injustice or
fatal folly,
& how other times I was expelled for so threatening the conspiracy
of mad mutual self-congratulation & punishing of innocence, genius, &
virtue--
I console my frustration at having so little influence among my
contemporaries:

that I've survived & remembered what I thought must be so
(tho none I knew of thought what I thought so could be)--
studying thru prolonged & bitter night & winter isolations,
constructing, & carefully casting out hard-coated seeds
among all who didn't think what I thought so could be,
& those struggling to break thru consequences of confident & aggressive
error--
& risked myself nurturing the seeds I'd planted among thorns & rocks,
where protocols are severely enforced in favor of the thorns & rocks.

But, then, I recall that youths like I was--indignant, isolated,
afraid--
require what I have yet to bring to fruition & deliver--
&, as in youth, I'm mobilized again--my energy compressed--
with experience now from which to draw conclusions,
& methods simplified by frequently repeated errors finally confessed,
& cast aside along the way that's only, for those youths, part of a
series,
stretching infinitely back, from which it's necessary to snap your
attention,
& face possibilities that depend on what is so, no matter who thinks
it's so or not,
& what others wisely or unwisely do, or fail to do,
& what you, yourself, might do or fail to do, going forward.

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