The Poet's Sestina

THE POET’S SESTINA The poet put the pen to his head and killed himself; he shot the leftovers of an ideal in a second of no-thought. His girlfriend found him rolled in a splash of ink with his legs and hands wrapped in political correctness. His room in its emptiness, a vacuum sucking rhymes, had musical scales carved into the plastered walls. *** His girlfriend layered beds of marigolds against the walls, she took care of his meals as if he couldn’t cook for himself. He was too busy with obsessed words to cluster into rhymes. His words crumbled like grains streamed along the thoughts poured in a bottomless basket not concerned with correctness, but he tried to build anonymous legends rippling the surface of the ink. He sold his words – like a cheap whore – in books with fresh ink, he ripped off pages of re-lived dogmas banging against the walls, he used an hourglass as a symbol of human tragedy’s correctness, and he tried to grab a crumb of eternity without being himself. A notebook with crippled verses extracted from et cetera was a thought, but they were all put together in knots and then broken with rhymes. When he was with his girlfriend between her breasts he found rhymes; her white large forehead was sweating bubbles of vivacious ink, he caressed her neck pulsing with life, “green life”, he thought, and the procreation restrained him in her vagina’s walls. She wasn’t all that, so he used a condom to please himself because he wasn’t what he thought he was. Finally he was correct. *** The mourners viewed his peaceful body laying in its correctness, moving slowly, in orderly fashion, as if themselves became rhymes. They were a confused herd of black sheep when they had to face him. A few giggles and chuckles hidden shyly behind spots of ink, reading the ribbons on the mortuary wreaths that hanged on the walls, they gathered in the corners with grandiose eulogies in their thoughts. His poetry wasn’t to be in the eulogy (but it was a thought), because they tried hard to find a line to please their own correctness and they talked some more, bounced ideas against the walls trying to understand the dead poet’s scheme of rhymes, but all they could see in front of their eyes was wasted ink, and they decided that none of them could understand him. “He was old, and he was bald. (This is a thought that might rhyme.) Everyday he drank at least a gallon of that incorrect ink, and because he isn’t Christ we don’t put his pictures on the walls.”