I wrote this listening to Phillip Glasses song "Pruit Igoe" from The Watchmen movie score:
His eyes are closed
Descending.There are ruins and broken walls here.
Children have fled to far away.
Hope has lost its hearing
Her hands are blind
And they have stopped their seeking.
His eye lashes are not locked
They rest-
A reposed disposition.
An exile!
He was an exile.
The exile descends.
This Zarasthustra has wandered.
There were many places
He saw many a sight
He looked but could not find.
The stars were bright, but they were not kind.
Here is but a jagged rust
Twisted beams
Sagging doors
Empty windows.
The monuments have fallen
A statue's hand lies empty under sky.
Glass shards on cracked pavements reflect the moon.
There is no life here
He descends.
He descends!
His eyes open!
There is no sound
He looks left and right
Between the gutted walls
Between buildings with missing teeth
He descends.
With arms extended
His foot reaches out,
The stones wait
Stars continue overhead.
He is descended.
The ruins.
He looks upon the ruins.
The exile looks upon the ruins.
When I listen to the song, I always have a distinct mental image of an infinitely tired traveler, a dying god or superhero with a terminal disease who descends over a ruined city at night. It is like a cosmic Gilgamesh who has searched the universe to restore his brother Enkidu, but upon failure, returns to his city. Everything is derelict; he knows this is the case, but he is serene and hence his eyes are closed to in a fruitless attempt to avert the inevitable reality of the true situation. Sort of like an inverse ascension married to Ozymandias moment...
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Amazing how my subconscious blended all that together.
I don't think the poem is that amazing... just cool how my under thoughts took different currents and wove them together so that I only realized the connections in retrospect
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