Archive
02/17/10
Knights of the Round Table
A relatively disparate, if obliquely cohesive, group of ten, A loosely conceived, far-fetched stretch of a secular minyan, A confederacy of pre-baby-boomer squires
Averaging sixty-eight years of rapidly degrading age, Gather, at high noon, in a hotel bar and grill convenient to them — A group that's resisted the forces that scatter lives,
Disperse them on the winds of corporate and etcetera whims, Uproot and remove people from one known zone to another (Which, thanks to American homogeneity, feels just like home).
Perhaps a hit-and-miss twice or thrice a haphazard year, This ragtag band of not-so-chivalrous sirs convenes To rehash their high-school hijinks, escapades, sexual conquests,
Reprise their litanies of business successes (light on the failures), Boast the family-Bible details of their hallowed genealogies, Now that they've become inveterate grandfathers-in-good-standing.
But one disquieting motif gallops through their collective rataplan, The warp-and-woof of their unrhetorical discourse: Their unanimous bafflement on realizing that the present is dead,
That what lies ahead is a declivity so compellingly precipitous That the abyss appears, daily, more and more viscerally visible And that all there is to keep each of them anchored to existence Is the elusive and ever-shifting Fata Morgana of their past, That too brief crusade from childhood, through adolescence, To college graduation, when reality began smashing their dreams,
Dashing their aspirations of achieving celebrity, deleting their deeds, Shattering notions of lasting fame along their lackluster paths, Withholding their names from buildings, institutions, laws.
And so, for two and a half protracted hours, Before the designated actuary among their slovenly gathering Computes the tithe-that-binds amount, including tip, each will pitch in,
They belabor their befuddlement over having arrived at this stage, This place that always loomed so vague and impossibly far away That it posed no dislocation, confusion, disillusion, melancholy...
Belabor the prospect that their prospects have diminished to this: A knights-of-the-round-table rite of nonpassage, To decide between fried calamari or fried chicken, with French fries.
02/17/10
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