THE ROAD

22 May 2008

I sat beside the asphalt road                            

Just resting for an instant,

And chanced to hear a sombre note

Come trailing weird and distant.

It was a sound, just barely heard.

I looked around: This is absurd!

What makes a noise like this one?

I am reviewing what I wrote a couple of days ago; I like to think that I am critically reviewing.  This first strophe barely makes the grade.

I scrambled to my feet and looked

Along the empty highway.

I had resolved the time was now

To manage things in my way.

No clarion call or muted sound

Would be permitted to confound

My latest resolution.

Not bad.  The rhyming is passable.  Some light is shed on the character of the narrator, and he is obviously in a bind,

For I had shed my principles

Injunctions and commandments.

I’d left the never ending race

For praise and quick advancement.

I had enough of “Don’t do this!”

“You must conform or you will miss”

Miss what? Miss whom?  I queried.

Well, there you are.   He, whoever he is, is rebelling.  Good on him!

And yet again I heard that sound,

But stronger, trumpet piercing.

Along the road there came three men.

An unseen crowd was cheering.

The first man was ambitions dream,

The second wore a rich man’s mien,

The third was ghastly naked.

A bit nightmarish- where the heck is the cheering crowd?  But the three men are intriguing,  So what is ambition’s dream and a rich man’s mien?

They halted and the first intoned:

My guidance you requested!

I know it all and can assist,

For many I have bested.

The second cleared his throat and said:

Your money counts! That’s all, my lad!

The third man did not speak.

The first one is a know-all, and he likes showing off.  The second man has lots stashed away, and is smugly comfortable.  The third hasn’t said boo.

And will you not alike bestow

Your counsel I am seeking?

I asked the third man, and he raised

His hand to cease my pleading.

You have been offered to be known.

You have been offered all to own.

I offer quest unending.

It wasn’t too hard to get the third bloke to talk, but his offer is a bit airy-fairy.

Elusive, yet confined in you,

Is knowledge worth the seeking.

What you think wise and want to own

That you must find. And keeping

It ever ready in your mind

So when you speak, concur, oppose 

Your judgment is commanding.

So what the naked man says is that what you believe is right, that’s what you should act on.  But he also reckons that what you really think is right, is a bit hard to get at.

And this is the end of the story.  A bit sudden, I feel.

Actually from the very beginning I thought of the last scene in Charley Chaplin’s film Modern Times, when he and his wife at the time (I can’t remember her name, but I reckon Chaplin would have had similar problems) walk down an empty highway, holding hands across the painted road centerline, Chaplin ambling at his Chaplinesque best.

So do we all