the pragmatic bleeding-heart response to Shelley in poetry

some would try to be
Ozymandias themselves
put up great empty statues
festooned in
dire warnings of their greatness

others might in some naive rebellion
devote their lives to tearing down
that statue as if the fact they did it
would be anymore remembered than
Ozymandias himself who would give way
either way
to the dust and sky eventually some day

neither of these approaches did much for me
for anything other than
a fleeting thought or teenage fantasy

others still might see the bragging placard
extant at the bottom of the ruins and
scrawl their name upon the carving’s back
as if to say “maybe this will last a little while
and I would like to mention even though I
was neither holy god nor holy terror either
I was here too, I was here for a little while”

my early adulthood was
devoted to this foolish ideal
which added up of course
to almost nothing

some last smaller group
would look upon the rubble
see the giant half-legs in the sky
read the portentous nothing at its base
as well as the graffito of the wanderers
who too declared themselves once alive
note it all down in their minds
then move on to more important things
to the next village along the ancient path
where there were people living now
move along to see if they could help them
do some actual good in their living now

and I try my best to be like them
to help the people in my now
as best I can how I can
where I can for as long as I can
though I’ll admit I do sometimes return
to my foolish egotism and
try to carve my name in curb-sides
as I go along

the lawful all go on and lust after
some towering more perfect past
that most likely never happened and
even if it did, will never come back

the chaotic yearn for violent revolution
toward a perfect future that
probably will never come to be and
even if it did, would hurt so many innocents
in the contractions of its wild delivery

and then there all the rest of us
just trying to make the hurt be less
in our living now as we might go along
so few get remembered for more than
two or three ensuing lifetimes and
those rare few who do
always end up remembered wrong

Ozymandias probably was never even king
just some real-estate shyster who thought
if he built a statue saying that he was
that’s how people would remember things

Last updated May 30, 2017