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)

I, always the me now, never the we,

ask again: Where does the anger come from?

The resentment? The manufactured past?

Mine, hers: what we remember: the slights

and wounds still bleeding. No concurrent flow

of telling, not even a parallel,

contrapuntal at best; more dissonant

tales to contradict, and exacerbate

the scream, the disconnect of skewed tangents,

no parallax to broaden perspective

Just the sharp shimmer of indecision

decimating any remnants of love

like hundreds of fragments of broken glass

tumbling out of a multitude of skies.

“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.