H e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s b e r g

N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i v e s E d i t i o n

RANDY ROARK

Happiness

At night the lights flicker and the windows

rattle as I go outside to see if anything can be done—

no longer sad but silenced as everyone is silenced,

prepared for what might happen by what has happened,

as if happiness is something that is only written about in books,

or something always about to happen, or it’s ambivalent

because we don’t really know what we want or why

and every time something falls over it's always falling over

all the way to the bottom, until it is as if I am waiting

for it to implode, and it shrinks back inside itself a little further

every time, the way the room dissolves into darkness just before

I close my eyes, until I doubt that such a thing as happiness exists at all.

But when the crisis passes and I have done nothing,

I feel like I’ve missed something without knowing precisely

what it is, or if it’s something else, or what I could have done

differently, or if it’s more important to me because I miss it,

whatever it is, as I travel further and further into the past,

the enormous quiet all around me, no one to hear me

or what I’m saying.

[From the author’s Santa Monica Notebook, originally published in NHS 2006, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs06/Roark.htm.]