HAPPINESS
by Andres Mesa HappinessNo one wants to talk about happiness.
One would expect,
Since there’s so little of it to go around,
People would clamor to hear
of the twenty people
In the heartland
who found their true loves
today.Some solitary academic
finally discovered
the answer
to his lives’ quest
and concluded
God
Is waiting up the street
to meet us in the corner bar.The day of judgment
Happened a hundred years ago
and everyone passed!It was a sweet fiction,
which we took too seriously
read a comedy
as a tragedy
and,
like children,
made a mess
of it all.But calamity
washes easily
with a little water
and good faith.Perhaps,
after five days of only good news,
people will stop
reading the press.They will line up
to hear about the guy
who cut his twenty lovers
into thin strips
and pieced from them
a map to lead him to his heart.They will yearn to know
of the fifty frigates
docked and loaded
ready to take the fight
to those who grew their economy
from blood and sand.Then,
they will look upon the stars
and realize
how far away
they are
from
the corner bar.
ShellsTime wishes to forget.
Men want to remember,
some want to be
remembered
as the tide sweeps in,
beneath houses built
on sand and stilts.We rush,
sifting along nooks and dunes,
looking for a shell
silver-lined
and gold-plated
among the heap
of rocks,
many and ordinary.Time wishes to forget,
and I myself
want to forget
about the lonely supermarkets
loaded with shells
and the shell collectors
who charge you interest on your shells,
or the long nights
spent thinking of
how few shells I have,
or of those
distant beaches
promising more shells,
or of the jobs
that force us to say:
“Please sir, shell out more shells!”The sunken-eyed politicians
promise all of us more shells
in the next eight years,
as our wooden houses
sag
beneath
the load of borrowed shells.They are building a machine
inside the Federal Reserve
that can assemble
a million shells per minute.We just have to do our part,
and write it all off
in our tax returns
so they can
pump out more shells;
explosive shells,
concussive shells,
incendiary shells,
and shotgun shells!
to be distributed
into the wide-open mouths
of pot-bellied infants,
in some part of the world
where they have lost
all
their
shells.Soon they will consolidate our shells,
and trade us
new plastic ones
which are just as good
but valid for only a few years
until they
finally make
fully electronic shells
so we can at least have
some in our accounts
and have
the peace of mind
to not think
about the people
who made our shells,
or the people,
distant and long extinct,
who did not have to worry
about hoarding shells
because the Earth was
thick
and
ripe
with them,
or to no longer
envy
those
who
at least
had a basket
to
put
their
shells
in. What if it Were to Be?Some loves
Are brief.
They come and go,
Like the rain,
or the years.Others,
long-lived
and difficult;
thick,
they cling to everything
like honey.But they too
disperse.The ebb and flow of time
takes them away.Although the brief ones aren’t as tragic,
their echo
rings longer.with them,
you can only imagine
What could have been.At least,
With the long ones
You know
What was. About the Author: Andres Mesa is a Colombian born poet who received his MA from Stony Brook University in 2014. He currently teaches philosophy in South Florida where he resides. His work explores the themes of transience, temporality and existential longing in modernity. |
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