I DO NOT SPEAK TO MANKIND

5. I DO NOT SPEAK TO MANKIND:

Police cars were trolling the cemetery’s edge and someone was pointing to the rear of their car as another police car – stopped – had an officer alight from it to begin writing a report - some damage entity had arisen between two cars and the narrow berth of clash and doom – averted once more – had left instead a crease and piece of broken glass at the back of one car and there was nothing else to go by except some overnight reports of what people had seen or didn’t and no one (they’d decided) had seen a thing and couldn’t tell if it was this car which had inflicted such damage while parking perhaps or overnight vandalism unnoticed before - and neither of the options was present for anyone to say so the cop began writing and the car’s owner swore to wait for the arrival of that ‘other’ driver who may have parked too hard and hit the car (‘but then why would he stop and park’ I heard the girl start saying ‘I’d have gone away quick before anyone noticed’) – so such circumstantial evidence meaning nothing at all had accumulated between the living while I instead was seated magnificently in St. Peter’s Cemetery just watching the living world go by - not a word nor a hankering for anything else but the sunlight above me which crept through the trees and that grave iron fence - old and black - which ran across the way surrounding me and keeping even my thoughts inside the area where I sat - behind me the harbor where the ancient man had been (he’d simply gotten up and slowly cobbled his steps away – towards something else some other goal some silence again) and as is said ‘on that day even the dead shall arise and come forth’ so maybe I was already there – but where they’d want to go I would not know and what soil here – if it opened for them – would call them welcome amidst the strangely living I reasoned not but yet I knew that EVEN FOR AN INSTANT if those cops beheld the rising of the dead they’d sure have bigger problems on their hands than who crinkled the fine gent’s solid fender and whence the glass but cops don’t think like that (hey they’ve got the gun and they twist the time to whatever is their liking) :

[‘When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them BUT when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows and to place himself contrast with so huge a body he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness – for the same equality which renders him independent of each of his fellow-citizens – taken severally – exposes him alone and unprotected to the influence of the greater number.’]

I frequented that establishment once too (me and Alexis DeTocqueville back when he was young and ready) but I have traveled alone for a good many miles and witnessed only newsstands and taxis worthwhile and inside each of them I found – in one way or another – a very worthless man : someone willing to serve and be meagerly paid someone willing to squander great benefits of time and hour someone wasting away and filled with countless broken dreams which have – long already – lost their language to speak or report and that becomes soon enough the MOST tragic aspect of life as I can see it – the wasted and squandered form of the broken and the bent the men without aid and the women of no resource the minds gone and rotted the limbs without use the bent feet and broken legs as ALL THINGS COMMINGLED return to time and destiny and nothing more and they want you to visit them they want you to talk but the pain - so obscure - is as deadly as fire and more painful to feel than wire cutting through some tortured flesh but that’s EVEN now the way life runs - mine yours and all - and the secrets of the flesh are constabulatory in nature and harbor many secrets in every quiet berth - for there is nothing to see but the unseen and everything else is hidden and the graveyard in fact right here around me - as old and proud as it wishes to be (is in fact one of the very oldest but why?) for flesh only forms around a rock and the old rocking dead are useless and gone – and but ONCE I would wish to be announced ‘HE IS HERE! and has arrived’ but there should be no reaction but the silence of desert and sea and I would stand tall and declaim : ‘with free will and wisdom then men may see the pitfalls of the democratic ages that stretch before them and than rather than submit to these pitfalls – the most extreme of which is the subversion of freedom by the tyranny of the majority – they may choose instead a wiser path – the path of freedom AND democracy’ : and I’d be cheered for nothing and declaimed useless and crazy and (truth be told) I’d think those words just as worthless as anything else for they carry nothing of the spiritual comport and the comfort of the saved but merely a materialistic envy of getting things done better and more soundly for the good of something called ALL (nothing I’D WANT TO BE INCLUDED IN).