Why Do Birds Sing?

“Time held me green and dying,

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

Dylan Thomas

If you can’t sing, at least don’t moan.

Life doesn’t care what you think…

I know…all I have to do is look at my own.

I gave my life to the world.

As a Buddhist, I shouldn’t expect anything in return.

It’s a miracle I can survive for a while, so there’s that.

I’m grateful for the time I have, my Buddhist path,

air,  water, the food I eat, the place where I shelter.

“Things get very clear when you’re cornered.”

My precarious life is a blessing from the lineage.

Wrote a song about it…want to hear it?

This is it.

I seem to be an archetype, an anachronism, a cliche,

that is, if I’m anything more than mere human.

Art vs. Mammon that’s the conflict I see.

I never thought much about money, acquiring stuff,

even a little more than enough…

too late to change now…I wouldn’t even know how.

Yeats, Eliot, even the prophets were bards that sang

about how the world would be. 

Who reads them now?

Who even listens to an early Bob Dylan song, that

showed us the times we’re in?

They all still apply, but who has ears to listen?

Not so much the young, scrolling screens, hypnotized

by imagery, much of it and more A.I., the darkness of

simulacra that obscure the truth, the Dark Age we’re

slipping into, whimpering, angry in spoiled defiance,

preferring plastic flowers that never wilt, Ozempic

bodies, industrial artifice to shield from the truth.

Life becomes a blur, a runaway train easily derailed

by the smallest intrusion of reality that wakes us up,

and we realize, our whole life has become;

“Where was I?”

That’s a good title for a song.