He Had Not Meant To Drift

He had not meant to drift Yet he could not avert the dreaded nature of his anarchic days; The craven, inebriated nights wherein all manifestations of Time Slipped away from him. Yet memory remained entrenched in the sensibility he sought to dull As did the cruel actuality of his youth, a negation. He was not as gauche, nor as ugly as he feared, And even, in his better days, Not as handsome as he wished. He was a hybrid entity, splintered at the nucleus, An estranged dark, stoic thing, And the intervention of others upon the isolate continuum of a self embellished In an unameable lattitude Solidified his existence to a fate that was never his. For Narcissism had been his fatality, and he knew it, And he had never meant to be an affront to God. Still some amorphous presentiment, which emerged, then retreated, Impelled him to nourish whatever innocence remained in him, As if that cruel malady could be ingested, assimilated, dart through The air into his trembling hands If only he could coerce his muscles into consummating the task. A response to a certain common loss Compelled him to frequent one particular deviant tavern; A "brother" is what he said he needed so desperately to find; How essentially insipid he must have been to believe that " a brother" Could be found in that dank, windowless chasm. Rendered ill, towards closing time, He wondered which had succumbed easier to the whims Of the foul wind that encircled him- Was it soul, or physignomy, Or was his Nemesis the streets, which he hit like clock-work Moments before this days death, and dawn. There was no plan to his existence; He simply went with the tide, however frenetic, the moon That made it dance, Such was his Life, An atrophied thing, Remotely adherent to his quest before his corruption: To acknowledge, even in the most solemn silence, His inalienable right to be as he was.