subtext

“—Hypocrite lecteur,— mon semblable,—mon frère!”

—Charles Baudelaire

O, Baudelaire, My Brother!

Is it easier to drink bourbon

than to get drunk on poetry?

What Dionysian folly must I 

indulge to feel your ecstasy

in an old whore’s tit?

You condone each ecstatic

moments’s origin anywhere

in a romantic equivocation

of a syphilitic vision with

ennui on a Sunday afternoon

if Eternity is called to frenzy.

Some days the light ignites

the sycamore’s broad leaves

with an electric green glow.

I am debauched in wonder.

The moment passes without

an augury, other than doubt.

The fleeting vision fades

into the deepening night.

I begin to believe the lie

revealed itself as a dream,

and I am too old to dream

beyond the rumbling hearse.

A prayer exists inside the dance.

The day to day slow rhythms

weave through bees and flowers

to entrance, blinding all

we could know if only open

to what the moment shows.

Is a lifetime enough to fill

my hands in that moment?

My vision blurs if I bend

to the garden too long,

the world’s weight whorls

forcing me to my knees.

(April 19, 2024)

“Stand by me, hold me, bind me,

O ye blessed influences!”

—Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Unrelenting and wild,

the wind tosses the trees,

ruffling their nascent leaves

like the undulating waves of the sea.

I know the course I am on:

for years — my way, my guide,

like horses from a burning barn,

my blinders led the way.

Without reason or judgment, 

I trust all will be okay — yet

Hope, like Justice, is blind.

I am compelled to believe,

through thousands of soft nudges,

that I know where I must go.

Perhaps, happiness is an aggregate;

moments of bliss embedded in moments

like bits of chocolate in fresh baked cookies,

and all we lack is a cold glass of milk.

Perhaps, the promise religion provides

is but venal desire disguised as hope;

the apple is always just out of reach,

it’s dewy flesh untouched by morning light.

Our jumbled happenstance is rewoven

each day into a more palatable

tale, where the hero becomes a fool

to the children gathered around him

on the days he works in the garden

pruning bits of his life as if roses.

(February 16, 2024)