The Glass Bead Game

Lament

No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds:
Through day or night, cathedral or the cave
We pass forever, craving form that binds.

Mold after mold we fill and never rest,
We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.
We move, we are the everlasting guest.
No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap.

What God would make of us remains unknown:
He plays; we are the clay to his desire.
Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan;
He kneads, but never gives us to the fire.

To stiffen into stone, to persevere!
We long forever for the right to stay.
But all that ever stays with us is fear,
And we shall never rest upon our way.

A Compromise

The men of principled simplicity
Will have no traffic with our subtle doubt.
The world is flat, they tell us, and they shout:
The myth of depth is an absurdity!

For if there were additional dimensions
Beside the good old pair we’ll always cherish,
How could a man live safely without tensions?
How could he live and not expect to perish?

In order peacefully to coexist
Let us strike one dimension off our list.

If they are right, those men of principle,
And life in depth is so inimical,
The third dimension is dispensable.

But Secretly We Thirst…

Graceful as dancer’s arabesque and bow,
Our lives appear serene and without stress,
A gentle dance around pure nothingness
To which we sacrifice the here and now.

Our dreams are lovely and our game is bright,
So finely tuned, with many artful turns,
But deep beneath the tranquil surface burns
Longing for blood, barbarity, and night.

Freely our life revolves, and every breath
Is free as air; we live so playfully,
But secretly we crave reality:
Begetting, birth, and suffering, and death.

Alphabets

From time to time we take our pen in hand
And scribble symbols on a blank white sheet.
Their meaning is at everyone’s command;
It is a game whose rules are nice and neat.

But if a savage or a moon-man came
And found a page, a furrowed runic field,
And curiously studied lines and frame:
How strange would be the world that they revealed.
A magic gallery of oddities.