Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.
My life was stolen by gypsies a long
time ago. Now, without you here, it's a
hollow thing, a shell. And although I remember
too clearly the happiness of absurdity,
I just can't get it together. I don't
like this melting kind of disintegration
where even the numbers no longer compute.
Life without you is not living at all,
and I've never been one to do it by
rote. And the rains are coming again today,
pouring their corrosive powers down upon
me. I see the rivulets of rust running
down, melting me down, coursing into streaming
pools into the mud. This is life without
you.
That's a prime /r/ alliteration right there in the last stanza. Those gypsies are a vile people, eh? But they certainly add a lot of flavor into this piece. The whole ubi sunt, elegy feel is very strongly mantained throughout the poem. The despair is a vivid, tangible affair thanks to the evocative imagery, especially the rivulets of rust etc. The vision of human despair as an impossibility to make calculation, as in, to make head or tails of the reality around us is interesting. The speaker doesn't want absurdity as a pain-killer medicine to numb down the soul. Life is now a hollow shell and the meaning and structure of reality as it used to be is shattered. We establish routine and relative happiness only to see it go down the drain or wash with the waves of the sea going in and out and in and out and corroding our tired machinery with every shattering cycle. This could really be an elegy of lost comprehension. Reason is the sole tool of survival and we struggle throughout our short lifespan to pamper and develop the faculty but life turns out like an onion and each layer we peel away gives way to another and another and then it turns out there are also invisible layers and migrating layers and all this structure sorts of bends inwardly and all too often we die with this helter-skelter mess in our mind. We are heartbroken, in a way. Our ambitions are stifled and what is life without ambition?
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