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Victor D Lopez
a book bubble about
Of Pain and Ecstacy
Literature & Fiction
Author Insight
Urban angst
I have been in love with the British romantic poets since my first exposure to them as an undergraduate student at Queens College. I wrote this poem as a freshman in college during the late 1970s when New York City was a very different place than it is today, especially if one took the time to peek beneath its thin veneer of glamor to the worm-boring beetles and dry rot that lay just beneath the surface. At the time I lived within the city limits but spent many weekends in the country with friends, walking in woods whose trees, birds and furry creatures spoke to me with a far different voice than that of the gleaming towers, endless cement and rodents that plagued the city. I hated Central Park precisely for the reasons the poem states. Its planned, manufactured, fake rolling hills, lakes and wooded areas were for me an affront to the true, natural beauty they had ravished and replaced--not unlike allowing some thugs to painst graffiti on the Mona Lisa or Sistine Chapel and call it "art."
Book Excerpt
Of Pain and Ecstacy
Free Verse
Flowers bloom next to rusting Pepsi cans,
Watered by the spit of cocaine dealers,
And the semen and vaginal fluid,
Of hot lovers groping under blankets,
Under stars dimly blinking through thick smog.
Nightly haven for muggers, rapists, fiends,
Whose every breath profanes the species they, So poorly represent, turning Plato’s,
Featherless bipeds, to dead plucked chickens, Soul-less, pointless wastes of protoplasm.
Abomination-- not in itself but,
For the use it’s put to: a bone for dogs,
Who’ve never tasted steak, and are gleeful,
To feast upon the scraps of fetid meat,
Clinging to well-gnawed bones that they are fed.
Central Park, the bone we are to chew while,
Smiling complacently at skyscrapers,
Daily rising where wild flowers might have grown, Our humanity proportionally,
Shrinking inversely to their daily rise.
If I seem narrow minded and unkind,
Or blind to the beauty of Central Park,
It is because I’ve stood on virgin ground,
In summer, fall, winter and early spring,
And cannot bring myself to love a whore.
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