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."