Saturday, May 26, 2007

VII


I dream of garlands and gems;
lilting laurels and lapel lambs
cascading and grazing-- erasing-- shivering lands.
Devastation-- stakes driven into eyes and wombs and tears and tongues.
It is a deconstruction of a simple-bare nation.
Impalation and mortal wounds mean nothing but festering
in the fall-- they fall, they fall-- and an awful feast of offal,
for opal worms.
I have dwelt in these realms of oblivion and the pain of Endymion.
(An illusion; a false allusion.)
I have felt the toast of maggot-spittle to the carrion,
and I have carried on with blade and buckler and chivalrous berth.
I am lowly and unholy upon these desolate stretches of earth,
and serve the children of the flies, and they fractured eyes.
They cannot see the ambience of the confident jewels that clatter by, out of grasp
--into the grass--
and I am afraid to reach for my own head, on its platter
in their refractions.
Conceded and discrete, deceit and conceit tangle and shine
as the crystalline lambs bleat for avarice.


This piece is horrible. It ended up being nothing like what I originally had in mind, and there's really not much to say about it. There's nothing to it. I'm not even sure it belongs with the Plain Praetorian poems, but I needed to put something up, because it had been over a week since I had presented anything.

So, my apologies.

2 comments:

Gunter Heidrich said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Gunter Heidrich said...

Eh, I don't know, it's perhaps more raw and therefore exposed than your other poems. That doesn't make it bad, more accessible perhaps than many of your other pieces too for better or worse.
Certainly not in your typical sort of Cryptic-Minimalism with Classics references mixed in though. This is rather more psychologically impressionistic. Not sure what I think of it. Probably doesn't fit with the other poems if only since it's done in the present tense, but I enjoy writing more that way to be honest, poetry especially. It becomes more psychologically palpable.