Song of the Alchemist

The young man's sure gaze
Eyes me from the frame on the wall
I both admire and shake my head
At his certainty

Music seemed to me then
A vast and rich forest
Of inspiration and interplay
Gods playing with gods
A celebration of humanity

Three decades on
I mostly see
A shallow money trench
Of artifice and avarice
Robots barking from taxidermied mouths
A mockery of immortality

Is it always like this
The marrow all sucked from the bone
The disgust at the dry remains

Or is it subjective
Like Herr Haller recoiling from the new jazz
Awaiting the revelation of the Magic Theater

Yet the writer in me
Feels the trajectory of the narrative
The story that doesn't end
But this character's role in it
Barreling towards his parting scene
Barring some deus ex machina
To pull him away from the event horizon
What that salvation could be
I haven't the faintest inkling
Maybe I'm not that good a writer

But of course life is not a story
We want it to be
We make it so in hindsight
In truth, it is just things happening
And not happening
And our pattern recognizing brains
Arranging it artfully into meaning

What life is now
At these coordinates in spacetime
Is pain
Physical decline
Problems whose solutions create new problems
Disappointment
Debt
Dogged determination
Responsibility
Devotion
And the tender ministering
To the glowing embers
Of the fire that will not die
No matter how barren and soggy
The ground upon which it was built becomes

For life without this fire
Would not be life
Not to the remains of the man
Whose former face regards him from the frame
Upon the wall

I think
That's why I keep him there
I could just as easily take him down
Just be done with bygone dreams altogether
And face the present as it comes
But who would that man be
I shudder to think

And perhaps that is the problem
The equation that never squares
The failed reconciliation of the two pictures
The one in the mirror
And the one caught in amber
In an age that the new generation
Can scarcely believe was real

For it is not only me
Whose future courses have narrowed
This place
This society
This culture
This nation
Has grown bitter with unkept promise
It is disgusted with itself
And flagellates its back with knotted cords
Willing greatness to emerge from the welts

Now, like its music and film
All it sees is an opportunity
To pick the corpse of the past
To strip the copper from the walls
And leave the husk to the elements

Yet this too may be a cycle
A storied renaissance may yet lie in a future
Unseen from this vantage point
A rebirth of magic
Of humanity
Of the real over the hollow

Is it ten years away?
Twenty?
A hundred?
Caught in the unblinking eye
Of the Singularity
It is hard to conceive

And maybe a mind whose formation
Was laid upon the frame of a now dead world
Cannot see the new patterns
And keeps pasting pages like this one
Upon the ever changing screen
Willing it to stop
Like he once did
When the music came on
And the world bowed its head
Make way
Make way
The muses are here
To save us

The sirens who hold sway
In this age
Sing in keys abrasive and cold
Says the old man scanning the liner notes
On a bottle whose lightning
Outlived its captors

Into this reverie
The kitten charges
Chasing its string
And I am brought back
Into the eternal now
As ill a fit
As it always was

But when it happens
Moments like this one
When the rain gauge spills over
And the words flow unfettered
Painting meaning onto the unknowing seconds
Telling them what they hold
In their unbelieving hands
There is an alchemy
A sacred ethereal reaction
That outshines the mundane gloom
And keeps me turning the page
Wondering what on earth
Might happen in the next chapter

It is the song of the alchemist
Same as it ever was
Same as it shall be again
Another corked missive
In a sea of stoppered dreams