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.]