His Own Captive

Those that went before him Were promised an orphan By the brutality of the elements The pestilence of society They were the pleaders of history The wounded veterans Of internecine strife Victims of little prejudices Whose faith in the probable Had been shattered By those profound revelations Woe the iron-bound skeptics When he- a dreamy scholar Intellectual in times before It was fashionable to be a freethinker Bulldozed the great rock Against those false morals And put up a philosophical defence To release the human mind From the shackles of centuries Of directional misguidance They- with inspired confidence And (one might say) Controlled reflex Drew a smile as from a catalogue Oh there was life in that smile And leaning on the years Found intellectual companionship In makeshift ingenuity He battled selfishly Against those callous endearments And sentimental mountebank sporting Not on musical instruments But on people’s obnoxious egotism… You might think This anonymous sage Earned a medal: There were demonstrations of affection Tempered with epileptic passion And resistant impulse But his social corpse Could not be sustained by precedent And was soon ousted By those immortal phrases About humane civilization His roving energetic mind Pregnant with unexpressed thought All those volumes of memory Delineated by consternation- Withdrew from mother’s apprenticeship Into mazy fairylands To spend eternity.