I – Old But Recent Craft
I make pollicitations to cunning bards past,
Place of old poets thy Parnassian pasts immortal
Your past-prime virtues now victuals to vexers who make you victims of gaunt learning or love-chagrinning solar sojourns.
In dissecting I seek to neither venerate nor eviscerate,
My lancet taps ichor and flowing essential claret extravasates into my peering vessel.
Thy outmoded phrase mould-grown with distant expiry
No narrative celerity, thesauring see-saw dramatics a periodical demands,
Every week three periods peering at readers from third-page’s bottom,
Thrills tamed by time and taste once titillating tedious in this time.
Thy foliate phrase, verbiage of verdigris lassos vellum psalters,
Thy posies a peony petal, all peacock and whorl and headdress whore,
Paean the paintaker, Olympians admit pain to him and that’s power,
Your prosody pain admits, therefore healing;
Thy hidden candour rebuffed at new millennium’s limen.
Though your age is gone your undimmed beauty hymns its genius;
Plain wonders have no want of sophisticated oration, your watchmaker exactitude.
Yet thy lofty compilation succours, common experience inalienable shouted across time;
Grasp solution from trials of antient persons,
Relay race of determined ancestors going to the edge of where they could;
Meeting the next; handing over the bundle; doggedly going on to the edge of where they could;
Chipped statue by whose feet I find tucked tools and a book of knowledge,
What next but to begin eking out its remainder.
Go now in peace.
Let nephew-taken arms be guided back to bedchambers.
Now, you have not even a ghost’s power to stir a naked flame,
I kiss your head, extinguish it for you then take your bundle,
Old things put to bed the poet’s pasture,
Portcullis rumbling closed; nyctinasty of shutting lids.
II – Abilities
Thy craft lend,
Blend fire and sight,
Twin utterance and song.
Elucidate right and wrong ways:
No nobled blood shall in pitying patronage let me a manse’s reign (though I would accept kindness); if ere my Rilken silks theretrod and heard the poem-rousing voice of One sublime,
What slithered forth would little pertain to angels or their kin;
Less of spheres, more of fears, of swarthy firesouled Djinn.
Poets old, lend fire to sight,
Born-drab wonders burgeoning blessings in birdfeather.
Helmetless pollard of hewn head foment fruitful trees.
Thy azure fontange sublimes, easy harmony highway of momentary animals graced by Peace.
You, most beautiful bard, goddess-regarding Minyan;
Three’s minion, golden means, many-death man of rhymes;
Welch Fusilier, cruiserweight bruiser, Claudian evocator.
Divine day isle of Deia, forth from Graves
Ridge of your grave peeking bird-nest head.
III. Pig Dreams
I wish I had been born a boar before scribes at history pawed,
Roamed landscapes untouched save for His indelible signature.
Sent between scents bounding boyish
No more to wonder what has meaning, lost amidst sensuous rapture.
Copse busy with never-stood-still, circled by timeless rings of never-moved.
No more to wonder but to wander;
Meaning forge no more, nor dreaming;
No more to lie abed dreading day’s dredging.
Escaping quietly as an anxious is elation.
Crowd huddled in a pleasure dome which I am far outside
Rain hits rim and bounces off, their words against my pride.
No more abed dreading day, hoping dawn’s netted dappling knells my demise.
Dare toward the dredgings of the day, for dusk will dive regardless
Strive to be innocent of mortality, living immortally
Though at birth they cut my stem and watched my slow death unfold
I will make lofty plans which a sage’s duration could not fulfil,
Embracing deterioration of accomplishment
Teasing out music from wreckage, bent fender vespers
At roadside rent asunder wonders warped wonderfully.
What has definition finds further definition; finds distinction; sublimes.
IV – Bindweed Lilies Near The Hospital
Six summers gleeful still, plucking bindweed lilies from grille-gemmed hedges,
Flowers plucked quickly die but how stationed this demise,
Work of ages accomplished momentarily:
White petals sprout spreading brown veins
Until limp and lined its back-peeled diameters meet;
My birth and death and that between duration of wind-pushed flames.
The music lasts just its moment but we rarely weep its close.
Each life the span of a universe’s most ambitious empire yet,
Exceeding forebears in extent, fanned-cards of possibly destinies.
Exhausted fate and errant miraculous presiding,
Placing bindweed lilies into the empty vase on the crying lady’s table,
Silks and satins and soft words.
Unbudged font of mercy,
What every woman and no man knows, that lilies are not children.
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