Farewell
Kids, when I cut out of this life,
don't turn on the tears and grieve;
kids, when I die I don't want
any golden speeches saying kind things
about me or some windbag sniveling about
death's sting, God's grace and
the triumphant rise to heaven.
Let the dead,
today, yesterday and forever
go down to the grave like conquistadors,
finding for themselves a new country,
a land beyond land,
go down the slopes of lost Dariens
with bold curiosity and care because, kids,
who's to say there's peace above or below?
Peeping through the clouds
for eternity may be worse than
tedious; we don't know
can't really conceive
the distant terrain of paradise.
Hell we know
and purgatory too.
Human in every aspect and
every torture, every atonement
at home with the world above;
Dante got it right.
I know that when
his better smith twisted
in the purifying flame, no longer a slave
to earthly yearnings,
his words to Dante showing
remorse and hope, gentle melancholy,
I know he knew the price he had to pay
for his excess of desire, of lust,
was fair and just.
When alive his poetry,
his voice, speaking, singing,
echoed through the courts of kings.
Christ or the muse gave him that gift
but talent doesn't trump sin
and now, below, his face glows with hope
rejoicing in the last vanity of death
waiting patiently for that day
he knows will come
when there is no sound not sweet and
heaven opens for him like the petals of a rose.
But enough with the Nick Lucas pick,
the purple patch, the discursion on long gone Arnaut.
Down to the devil or the Greek judges we go
or floating up to the empyrean,
but let's make no more mythology;
if, on inspection in some special vault of time
beyond Einstein’s rules,
beyond the peace of heaven, the furnaces of hell,
I look and smell like a piece of moldy cheese,
my leaving commonplace and everyday
as my own poor talent,
don't knock the gods or human fate
or death that rots;
in a better world under better stars
open-mouthed Arnaut's upright carcass
like Memnon's colossus
would stay and sing
as long as forever
to the stones of mother earth.
Dionysus
Let blue dawn's arpents,
lazy lawns and meadows,
announce him coming, coming,
in linen decently attired;
making his haphazard way
from someplace to someplace
with his drunken flock
of wilding followers;
the country folk gape,
the shepherds
standing still as cranes.
Any kind of close glance,
as offensive and out of place
as a looking glass pointed
at a dictator's face.
All of his devotees yelling
their heads off,
right-handedly waving
their dangerous staffs;
pine cones and sharp iron
at the tips and
blood and worse
on their hands.
His legend,
sinister and old,
affords no relief
from anything
we really fear;
that special dark
that never leaves us.
His horns spell out
the moonrise
or used to,
his retinue so used to
his grace of unseen animals,
his robe or his half-naked splendor;
he holds them forever tight
with ecstasy and death,
the hedonism of madness;
his power catches the eye
breaks on the bystanders
like the sea over a reef.
His movement, undetermined and subtle,
moves his worshipers in strange ways,
moves them unbeknownst
as the divine ocean moves anew
in the ears of the sad seahorse.
His pride is peerless,
matchless; his mysterious heart
beats for more than the vine;
like the lion of the dune,
like the strange houses
lining the river banks
he is never seen twice
in the same guise;
his unruly crew,
filling the countryside,
cover the mountainside
with bloody carcasses and vines
and those sacrificed to him, even
far away in quiet gardens,
seeming safe from his storm,
are torn to pieces, piled up parts
become a heap of brilliant red.
The god comes and goes,
becomes vicious and sullen,
malicious in his playful ways,
requires more and more
freedom and frenzy, more
sacrifice from his people,
more food for the dead.
The air outside,
close and oppressive,
the air of an enormous attic
filled with the scent
of thyme and ivy intoxicating
and his wand
drips with honey and death.
Pentheus, defiant, curious,
jailed him, but chains
could not hold him,
the wards opened and
torn from a tree and
torn limb from limb,
Pentheus paid the price,
his dead parts
brought home and
more or less assembled,
even to his severed genitals
and booted feet,
laid out in state at the palace.
And the bull, the bull, shows
and tells the divinity
of justice and revenge.
Famed Orpheus paid in full,
confounded by happenstance
and the wrong abstinence;
spurned and rejected,
raging Thracian women
tore him apart,
their sacred female flesh,
asweat in Bacchic frenzy
and Orpheus' sundered yodeling head,
goes floating down the river.
And Dionysus goes on
to his next stop and his next,
leaving the remains of his passing
to those possessed and empowered;
as to the rest,
let them lie where they fell.
What a longing we have for this!
Break it all down
to a release from reason,
as sweet and reasonable
as we think we are;
flowers of the field,
lilies of the valley,
the silent velvet beauty of the rose.
But there's more than this.
For more than this
in her shell and
slide-out box
the rose sighs in the morgue.
Duffy Ain't Here
Duffy, a couple for the road;
for us sinners
peace of mind seldom settles
at one sitting; who drinks
must mourn his sober self
and Seagram's does more
than the devil can
to justify the thorny paths of sin,
the ungodly things we do,
dirty, sneaky, selfish
sunup to sundown,
making our own misery
every livelong day.
Of all the causes
which conspire to dumb the senses,
assuage the remorse of conscience,
the noise of human concourse
leads the pack, driving us mad
with its demands, over the edge;
buzzing, humming, thrumming
of the human beehive or better yet,
red-hot bronze ready to go,
a thirsty Moloch always wanting.
Man a political animal,
so said Aristotle in cozy clamorous Athens
and welcome to it;
more noise for our own good, he said,
but we know better and so did he.
So I sit and drink and think
and love of solitude and gloom
combine, as I sink in the booze,
my hat on my head,
looking in the mirror
at a man with a hat on his head.
Dark with dirt,
the windows exclude
the remaining light of day;
in the glow of the
green neon sign
behind the barkeep,
in the gloom
of dusty bulbs overhead,
we blink and burp like
pallid monkeys in a zoo.
Passing time
I formulate a compliment
for the lady on my left,
painted to no avail;
I see her full in the dingy light
and bow to her
whose course is run.
A look at my watch,
it's time to go,
hasty I leave,
wave goodbye Charlie
and out the door.
They say small habits,
regular ways,
afford great comfort
if given time, but
too much time makes
deadly dull work of it,
laborious drudgery and
the canary in the coal mine
is when too much time
dwindles to no time at all,
frozen in place
like the great wave of Hokusai,
one eternal day,
like Hawking's space,
or the Schwarzschild radius,
one enormous rigid abyss
in which you sit forever,
a witness who sees nothing
and cares not a whit
for the never-ending day,
the never-ending landscape of now.