Finals Time (Poem)

Out of thine heart a perverse joy
cries, wafts in through the blinds.
Fog and clouds hide the face
of the day:
Winds flutter flag masts;
lone cars and bicycles stride by.
She says that tears are not
signs of weakness.
Jesus cried, the pastor explains.
Regret, though, stains noble
recognitions that all this has
happened before. All is one,
one is all. The galaxies, along with trillions
of stars hum in praise
of the awe-filling temporality
and permanence of the universe.
Birth, death, and rebirth as immutable
axiomatic principles that transcend
time, making the eternal temporary
and the temporary eternal. Cries
as mirthful expression and rendings of
the human heart—this is the whole
of faith and of humanity. From the
homeless of the inner city of brotherly
love (Philly) to the Palestinian Jew
to the dead female corpse in a ditch in
rural China to the lonely housewife
in a cold multiple-chandeliered dining
room. There is no hierarchy of
oppression, to use Audre Lorde's words.
I say there is no hierarchy at all.
No binary opposition—no differance—
no ideology—no RSAs (repressive state
apparatuses)—no superstructure
or base or historical materialism.
There is no such "thing" as "logic"
or "reason": or even "logical" "principles"
like "law of noncontradiction" or
reductio ad Hitlerum/absurdum or
Aristotle, rhetoric, dialetic, Hegel, Yeats,
Tennyson, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer,
Eliot, Woolf, Dickens, Tolstoy, Gandhi,
Dostoevsky, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao. No
me and you. You do not exist. I do
not exist. All are one and one is all.