From Honey to Ashes Poem by Geoffrey G. O'Brien

What follows is terms and classifications, the West
Of speech congratulating itself within
A system so complex there's no way not to be
Effective. Just as they had planned the streets
On either side are lined with all that's needed,
Storefronts whose glass returns a look
Filled with the contents it displays
(Mannequins, organics, mobile phones)
Making even moving sitting still, an embrace
Above anything that's so. Cuts and clouds
Drift south across the far part of the sky
From adventure to instruction, so where
There is only the mildest threat of showers
You see a shape and then a story, parody
Of the private life of the world.
And what was promised to the mind of the hearer
In transformation remains away, ideal
Portrait there is a certain pleasure in reading
As buffer against what today sends tomorrow.
It's like forgetting that part of childhood
In which one learned to do everything
From the pages of a book not unlike
A painting, but a painting with motion
In its idle depths, down where dusk meets
Foreclosure and the clouds charge out
Into the gift of seeing them forthrightly
Pass by a thing that might have happened, public
Pleasures that progress, the horizon, etc.
Always more or less just starting out
Its day, though it would be better to call it
A grouping sent down through suffering
To sunset, signed in the same place by night
To win over the jury in advance; it's a painting
Of the burning of a book whose content is
Colors, lights, flowers, fragments of bone
Taken from the wound, from greater and lesser
Distances, to tell the bad from the good,
Buy the evening's groceries in every sense.
What follows is seven dominated days
Of the week ready to bind with really anything
At all, your thoughts as you come forward
Out of the haze like sun through a curtain
Or go to sleep so as to be of further use—
You would like to choose between them
But aren't these one and the same task?