Jar Of Origami Cranes Poem by Norman F. Santos

In rooftops, in trellises
People strut like an alley cat
Gyrating their flamboyance
And trying hard to enthuse
The blasé of the spectators below

In gardens, in sea shores
People will prod for a gazebo
And conceal their precious jewels
Screen them from the thorns and tides
And from the sweltering sight of the sun

In planes, ships, or trains
People would doze in the expedition
And rest their lethargic heads
To miss the motion picture
Playing outside their windows

In bedrooms, in churches
People would utter a prayer
Before looming icons and candles
To deliver them from all evil
Such blinded greedy pleas of fanatics

In bookshelves, in bar corners
People would careen over the macabre
And sulk in inebriated isolation
Titivated by loquacious melancholy
A feigned scream of brazen idiosyncrasy

In poems, in letters
People, like myself, errs
And dispense everything into angst
Rasped by an ineffable trance
Of lackadaisical sycophancy

In simplification, in surrealism
People would lose the rhythm
And reduce the pulp into a gravy boat
Of cheap, mentholated or carbonized,
Gaudy and squalid hedonism

If I would stumble on a place
Where I can make origami cranes
I would pawn a lifetime and craft a sunset
From a folded paper and keep it in a jar
Like a fallow secrecy of a Pandora’s Box

If I could build such a place instead
I’d settle to the places where the sun
Rises its head and sets back in attrition
So that all the people, sybarite or saint, could muse
The jars of origami cranes and fondle each other’s laments