Free for All, This Sideshow

Free for all,

this sideshow.

You take the ticket

for entrances and no exit,

the price cut

to a third

because

some

body

BIG

is born in a manger.



A show of no-force,

this farce, a.k.a.

happy holidays

the terrorists

the capitalists

the religionists

the clerics

have either vowed

to reject or

respect

as in centuries past

of victory or

of defeat.



In some ways, this is called

Domination, capital D.



Or another form

of covert colonization

of the mind, capital C.



Or that capital

of all the capitals

you can think of,

capital C:

Capitalism gone haywire,

brainless, mindless.



Irrational.

Arational.

Atavistic.

Immoral.

All the adjectives

you can think of

to account

this grammar of greed,

this cadence of cold conceit,

years and years

of the same greed,

the same conceit,

all the time in frenzy,

the beat in allegro,

the rush in andante.



This is what happens

when the time of our life

loses its heart

and its spirit

goes kaput,

is gone,

dead.



It becomes

a new big D, dominant or

a new big C, capitalist.



And so we lose heart.



We cannot speak

of forgetting

here.



There is no such

when the soul

is somewhere else,

with the gusts in the west,

with the surf riding high

on the balmy waters

and the air is a breeze

soothing you.

For free.



For a fee you speak

of going home to partake

of ricecakes and the reasons

for the remotest of possibilies

of either celebrating

or just sleeping it off.

The festive seasons

are the timeliest

for the show.

There are the bonuses,

a jacking up of payslips

merry morale

for the shopkeepers

to rake it all

to have all of it

in beribboned boxes

of sweet nothingness.



You go through

that, for its force

of a farce, a yearend

ceremony of lost loves.





Aurelio S. Agcaoili

Torrance, CA

Dec. 18, 2004