Long Rowley Poems

Alas Poor Chatterton

Torn are the pages of a callow poet’s scripts and poetry 
whose temperaments in intensity brews, obscurity he owns
this lad of seventeen summers, by deluges done in,
unfortunate understanding and  s
                                                   u            
                                                      c   c   o  r   beyond his reach

Could it be his fiery red hair complements his fiery despair?
Flames of passion forged and fashioned from fragments
of wholeness denied blamed
Treacherous wrath resilient with bounds
and a harsh fixation that poison can cure
A martyr of poetic unjust, starved wooing words   
spurned disdainfully by ruthless curs
O the valor oft times dons the mantle of resign, 
sobering, despairing leap away, away 
from the s c o r c h i n g   i n f e r n o
internal, and into the great expansive beyond

Alas, at Sir Wrens St Andrew’s, 
there lay the flesh of a premature eternal rest 
and then, to bones yet destined to become fully-fledged

         w       p  o  i  s   o  n       t
            h                              h
                y                      y
                          t  s
                    h     ?      e
                 e                   l
             n_                        _f

an arsenic end, 
steel grey runs through veins
conscious elements eminence 
Farewell to his anguished soul,
for his is a romantic eternal g’bye
fiery passions, temperate, b’fore him
an endless sorrowful slumber 

A forger’s legacy

Elinoure and Juga Rowley works
War irks, such irks
Scarlet drips his corpse
O beloved knight in shining armor,
sisters’ pleas _/\_ raven’s mimicry 
What war brings is not bright

“Virtue’s race
Is run in paths of pleasantness 
and peace
though narrow, yet sufficient for the few
who have this Pearl of Price
alone in view”
                —Thomas Chatterton