The End of Politics

The living soul will demand life, the living soul won’t listen to mechanics, the living soul is suspicious, the living soul is retrograde!

—Dostoevsky’s Razumikhin in Crime and Punishment 

The living soul wants toast and coffee, warm
beside a window with a square of grass
outside, a smudge of sun, a lifting swarm
of midges, light like fingers on the glass.

The living soul wants living waves of sound,
voices carried by the air the way you bear
a heavy quilt in from the line, squares drowned
in soaked up warmth. The voices reach you there,

propped in your comfy chair beside the frame
of light, a book forgotten on your lap.
For just a moment you have peace, sans fame,
sans wealth: the soul content with living hap.

—Ben Myers