As we age, the nasty habit of sitting up in the middle of the night
with sweat running down one's spine seems to be fading away
Now only once in a while I find myself
holding my head up in both hands in darkness
the wee hours of the morning
absorbing the impact of the irrelevant

"The great river has stopped!"

The dream of this stoppage of water flow of the great river
first came on to me as a pain rather dull
The worst part of it is that I seem to enjoy such an agony
It sharpens as it expands on.

Millennia have dissolved into our blood line
We've taken the flow of the great river for granted
We sing in the wild symphony
We feel encouraged to let go our voices
All of our pores open, limps free
Soul and spirit floating
Our entire existence flies high and low
We curse and praise the inspirational vigor and spirit
We laugh with the rude roar and cry in shipwrecking flood
We live in the great arms and die to become the flow
We love, we hate, we come and we go, the only constant
Is the great river and its magnificent flow
Since time eternal the great river is the reason
for us to be and not to be
Both strange and wondrous that its unruliness
makes us wild and civilized at the same time

Never in our wildest dreams had we given it any thought
that the spectacular rush would someday come to a sudden halt
Thus when someday became today, we are stranded here to shudder
Who would supply us with emotion, reason, inspiration?
How else would we experience hope and hopelessness at one glance?
Help and helplessness in one life?
Pride and arrogance at the same time?

Oh, Great River, we cling to you
like children to an expressionless father
Please, you can torture us but never let us dry out
and become dull, humorless and lifeless
Never, never leave us with nothing to look forward to
for tomorrow can be such a horrendous nonexistence

However, you've decided to stop
You took a deep inhale and fell down like a giant
With horrifying spasm and moan.  Now
Even each of us wishes to die a thousand deaths
in the hope to bring you back
you will not be back.  Never

In the corpus of the once great river
unchecked dustbowls constantly shoot up into the air
Clusters of dead weeds swirl in the shrieking windstorm
A world has run out of tears
We the once proud complainers of the great river have ceased to be
Who had known that we are more pathetic when depleted

It won't be long before nobody could even remember
There was a great river
that once provided us with vitality and imagination
on this planet which used to be green
and full of life and emotions.  It won't be long

August 1-3, 1999