Death of a Romantic
The bees buzzed as they always did
and storms receded.
Silence hushed itself inside a shell.
Jackrabbits hopped away from hell
still intoxicated.
The village swarmed with threats.
Honest men could no longer
make their way. Poets payed
their debts for being who they were;
blessed, and afraid.
Wives bled, chasing phantoms in the
snow. "Art's no consolation."
Husbands crept along their spikes
of faithlessness. Rabbits left.
High in space their conscience burrows.
He drags along his skinny guest;
terrific, bleeding & uncouth.
Mercy equates with Obesity -
"Let me bulge and burst my longing!
Make me fatter than the fattest Truth."
A woman yelps, "I like a good romantic"
and so she laughs and feigns forget.
"Be like the constant nights of snow."
But when the orchards raze themselves to bone -
he pays attention to her neglect.
Ponies stall. Apollo's thief was
phony. Hope is tall and all his
hollow follies, "Entertain the queen!"
somehow like a burning house afloat
with sediment & gasoline.
_"Is all my life in vain? The puppets
with their masquerading calls -
do they see me, twisting nettle,
knucklecutted at midnight, precious,
unseen like a fete with no stall?"_
"Ah, but you've met in Life's divining mirror
the very ladder of your beauty's fall.
Yet still in abstinence, still in nothingness
along the ridge of this exquisite loneliness -
crawl."
Copyright © Jim Marshal | Year Posted 2009
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