Poetry – Matthew Keville

The Curse On Omelas

Here is the truth of Omelas:

It is never just one. Never just one whose misery buys the pleasure of Omelas.

There are dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. There are pits next to the palaces.

Some serve directly. They live in the pits and the slums and the outskirts and each day they travel to the palaces where they cook the meals and clean the rooms and wipe the baby butts and make the pleasures of Omelas possible.

And the Favored of Omelas see the painted-on smiles of those whose children would starve if they were fired, and imagine that they are happy in slavery.

Then there are those who serve as playthings for the Favored of Omelas: the mocked and bullied and abused, the school sluts and the fat girls, the trailer trash and the druggies, tormented without consequence and rounded up by the police to fill out the quotas they tell the world they don’t have.

Things thrown from passing cars, trucks swerved to spray water and make them jump, mockery shouted as they pass by.

What were you wearing? Don’t try to ruin a good boy’s life.

The Favored tell themselves that the Abused deserve it.

And that’s how they can take pleasure in Omelas.

But there are some among the Servants and the Playthings, some who aren’t so broken that getting their head shoved in a microwave and getting fucked in the ass isn’t just another day. Some of them walk away and some stay because they have nowhere to go but the basement of Omelas.

Their strong wounded hearts nurse a mighty rage, and a mighty curse, a curse that slowly eats at the foundations of Omelas.

And the Favored in their palaces mourn the downfall of Omelas and wonder how anyone could want something so perfect destroyed, and as they grow old and frightened, they forbid Omelas to change. All knowledge they disapprove is silenced. Newcomers are unwelcome. Any pleasure that is not theirs is forbidden. Any business that would bring newcomers or forbidden pleasure is stifled. Wealth ceases to flow.

Hope withers. More and more walk away. The Favored find they cannot live without the Wounded Hearts.

And Omelas doesn’t fall. It rots.

The Day The Children Danced

It was three generations from the time a starman said “Let all the children boogie” before the children finally did.

No one knew how it happened or why, or who put the album in rotation,

But somewhere out in the outlands, at the crossroads of nowhere and everywhere, where the night wind blows in off the desert and the highways stretch out into forever, a radio station with chrome walls and neon signs began to broadcast.

And all the radios and the TVs and the computers and the phones and iPods stopped playing games and video clips and songs from a fallen world and started to sing with heavenly harps and steel-gleaming voices and the thunder of rock & roll.

Gabriel had a trumpet, but who knew Michael had an axe?

And the children remembered what most of them never knew about tuning a transistor radio in the deep part of the night and holding it to their ears so they could hear the songs coming from the distant cities where hope hadn’t run dry.

And the children began to dance.

First came the freaks and the outcasts: the fat girls and the scrawny boys, the ones with the piercings and the colored hair and the shaved heads. The fags and dykes and queers and sluts. The disgraced and the disowned. The beaten and broken. The refugee and the runaway. The shy ones who hid in the corner and the ones who spit in the world’s face and raged.

Of course they heard the music first. They’d been listening for it so hard and so long.

With the freaks came the artists (often one and the same), the strange beautiful creatures, the ones who’d spent their lives dancing and singing the faint echoes of the Song as it played in their souls, living receivers playing out peace and joy and rage and sorrow to the world. Smeared in paint and clay, they came. Wearing masks and make-up, they came. Reciting verses and telling tales, they came. Singing arias and pop songs and rap, they came. Dancing ballet and jigs and twerking and tap, they came. Playing drums and fiddles and guitars and pipes and whistles and synthesizers and buckets and spoons, they came.

Finally came the lucky ones. The quarterbacks and the cheerleading captains. The prom queens and the homecoming kings, the private school students and the Greek system presidents. The ones who got horses or cars for their birthdays, the rich and the beautiful. They came last, as they’d come first their whole lives.

Lucky those lives had been so short. They’d almost lost the Song in the sound of their own good fortune.

They danced in hijab and in miniskirts, they danced in suits and rags.

They ran at each other and roared in each other’s faces, they kissed and groped and tore at each other’s clothes, hate replaced with terrifying love.

They filled the streets, they danced in the deserts, they sweated and stank under the Sun. They howled to the Moon, they splashed in the fountains and they kicked up dust. They raised their faces to Heaven and screamed in love and joy and rage and anguish at the ruined world they had inherited.

The walls fell and all the promises of the apocalypses were kept.

Even as they started to shine like young stars, there were those who tried to stop them dancing – the greedy, the cruel, the powerful – those who wanted no new world to arise because they were important in the old world, and those who wanted no better for their children than they had had themselves.

But the dance couldn’t be stopped. In many kinds of rapture, they rose into the sky and their light shines down on us still.

And some of us who were left behind look up to that light, and we remember what it was to be young, and we take hope from the children where we should have given it, and we begin to hear the faint distant echoes of the Song.

Let the old folks boogie.

Here are the works of art that inspired this poem. First, David Bowie says “Let the Children Boogie”. Interesting how Starman sounds like more than just an alien. Maybe a benevolent Outsider Thing:

Then P!nk shows us what the children dancing might look like:

Out On The Airwaves

There is a radio station out there at the crossroads of nowhere and everywhere. Out in the outlands beyond all lands, where the night wind blows in off the desert and the highways stretch out into forever.

Where the Sun never rises to bring the mundane morning, but the Moon is always full and bigger than she should be and she shines down a silver day as the stars gleam bright in the vast black of the big sky and form unfamiliar constellations.

The radio station is an outpost of light in an endless summer night, its walls gleaming chrome, its neon signs showing call letters that no one can read, its broadcast tower shining steel lit by flickers of lightning and St. Elmo’s Fire.

That radio station plays rock and roll endlessly, the essence of rock and roll, and if you ever hear it, you’ll know the endless summer night that it’s playing from, because that night is yours.

In that endless summer night where the radio plays, it’s always the summer when you were young and strong and beautiful and free, and love was new and passion was wild and your heart was unscarred.

It’s the summer when you read the bus schedules over and over, when you walked to the edge of town and looked out over the highway, over the hills, over the shining horizon, and you knew your destiny was there, and adventure called to you from every song.

And that endless summer night is the night when you danced around the fire and made love in the tall grass and the music played on and on and on.

You hear the echo of that summer still, in the best part of your heart.

And maybe some night if you heard that music over the radio, coming in pure and true from that radio station on the borderlands of forever, the circle would close between youth and age and the wheel would turn and the stone would roll away and you could step out again into that endless summer night, where the world was new and you stood straight and strong.

Maybe. If you could be brave. If you could be true. If your heart isn’t too old to hear.

But whether or not you can hear, the radio station still plays.

And there are still those who tune their transistor radios to the AM bands in the deep part of the night, and they hide under the covers and they listen for the sounds from the far-off cities of dreams where hope hasn’t yet run dry.

And they hear something from much further away, coming in pure and true.

They hear that radio station, playing rock and roll in the endless summer night.

And they get ready for their turn to dance.

New York Moment

Sitting on the N train

Riding for Coney Island

First visit of the season

A young Hispanic man and I

Me sitting

Him standing and holding a pole

Watch an old woman with a walker

Get up from her seat, carefully steadying herself against the train’s motion as she gets ready to leave.

We meet each other’s eyes

Then look back at her

Respecting her old New York strength

But each of us ready to lunge and catch if the train’s relentless stop-and-start defeats her

As it has the young and surefooted

The train stops. She plants her walker and gets off.

He gets off too. Not with her. He isn’t her nephew or grandson. They don’t know each other.

I go back to reading my book.

Our eyes don’t meet again. We don’t speak.

Three people who never met.

A New York Moment you won’t see on the news.