Thirty-Three Squared

Thirty-Three Squared
Written by Jonathan Henderson
Tuesday June 17, 2014 @ 3:14 AM

Thirty-two and so very few! How I never knew you,
Never seen what the Arbiter of Thoughtcrime was, in

Its stead, so very true; and O! How you colored me a
Shade or two as the red boy of 1981, that year I slid

Down that canal, destined with my own write and but
A mere purpose for an energy to expend, to engage all

Who might dare pollute the aural consciousness with
Either one my rich tone in sonorous harmony, a life I'd

Trade with not even my muse of the imagination, or to

Ruminate amid the ignominity of my failure to launch

To the moon - a smug, blithe countenance a president
Dreams amid the change towards a people's morte
Is to serve as the green cheese to feed all from so far

Away from here; and there I spoke once more of that

Change where I see a dark face of consistency of sheer

Despotism, but in his card games, a mirage echoing
Old Hickory the first Caesar, his kitchen cabinet to
Slice as if each day being Thanksgiving the halal of 

Preferentiation to a sultan of a haram, and those quartet

Of brides engaged in a dervish, rotating round and so

Round, till like the man of a mum Manchurian culture so

Cloaked behind a veil only transparent amid darkened
Matter: did he live at the foot of a winter's snow 'neath

Kilimanjaro? A product of a governor of Imelda and

The shoes she bought, the opulence upon herself she

Lavished as fellow peasants in the fields and those 

Scruffs in the thriller of the Manilla streets scrapped...

...and yet were let to slip and slide beneath the salty 

Daggers of the jungle's fever: O! A winter of chills,

A discontent from one generation of the state's role

Of a people's arbiter for their daily bread or the rice 

And la bebida del dia to the televised rubber neck

Of our villa stupidus, never knowing, never caring,
And upon Sunday, now two days post natalem, I
Now at thirty-three see that in the mirror, gray hairs 

Have sprinkled a distinction I never earned, wrinkles

Bequeathing me a life all too harrowing and yet just
One leap of a faith in the liturgical apocrypha shy of
My grande finale either of lore or the fall of my old
Edifice once thought to be a conviction of iron will
And a foundation of bedrock, only to see that as I
Sink within the quicksand, the seas would've been

So worthy of my taking a swim just to say I sank
In an act to have lived dangerously even in defeat.