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Inhaling the smoke like some flapping door in the wind, Drawing in, begging to be drawn in, I sit and wonder at the vacancy inside. Crackling pipes, the rustle of water, indeterminate conversations somewhere.
Indeterminate future, waiting out there, Preparing myself to look back once again —
To wonder: did I dare?
As I sit here, inhaling the smoke in despair, The obsolete ablution of words grows thick and detained,
Grows vapid and vacant as the eyes of young women
During dilatory disjointed defections All serving to justify a fool’s appellation: The Strange One. Damp lamplight around the sour-faced streets, Black asphalt and dew Scarves and heavy-shelled coats, and obstinate faces
Brewing a stew of affection
For what?
Shallow-breathed conversations buried in an inarticulate embrace,
A stodgy confession, perhaps a hand touch or two; And cheap elegiac eyes, and cheeks that flush in the wind. In the end washed away. What good are the sages, the pale romantics, With their salient looks and their phrases, When all that is left is a barren destitute wasteland of bus seats,
Coffee-fuelled heart palpitations and bitter regret At the things left unsaid?
The obsolete conjunction of worlds grows thinner, detached With each exhalation; what one often remembers is but a sensation
Somewhere buried beneath. To disinter is to destroy the disjunction — The farcical fence abutting our graveyards. But what if it isn’t a farce? What if the Reaper is Synthesis? And what if what is buried beneath should stay where it lays
Half-eaten by self-certain maggots?
It is not the fools in old-style hats and coats anymore
But the young. Very few are old anymore. Dare I rebel from non-action? Resisting refraction from the cradled resolve means
Destroying the cradle of that which you are.
For that which you are you are not when asleep.
Herein the problem. It is one thing to wake, but another to live. To live. To live is to be? No, Dane, the question is this: How can one be and not merely exist? How can one be and not merely subsist? A contradiction of love and not love, of dream and analysis
That which you were and that which you will, Each moment gone, each moment re-lived. All in the grave, all disinterred. To dream is to be and to be is to dream. To live is to know: this is all but a dream.
We are, you and I, inside the hollow hour. When lunar sediment is still upon the narrow streets, The hissing out-breath of evening wind caresses branches, leafs,
Where all that seems is what could be or what has been. A time, one time. O’ blight tumultuous monotony, we shall be gone awhile,
Toward the sycamore that bows. Let us go, with viscous vision, you and I, Toward that place where indecisions and the whims The memory enraptures rather than dislimbs. Where loss is (really) an abstraction, Where smoke-filled half-dark tempts a laughter from a friend,
And you’re both young, naive and true.
I wonder sometimes, what shall happen to you? Can you burn ‘till the end? Can you continue to rage
Until the very last page of your last definition? Is this even a rage? Or have I fallen asleep? Have I fallen up into diluted pale-ringed ether Held up by my fingers, away from my eyes? Am I swaying below the purposeless scaffold of purpose,
Lynched by the Truth on the charge of her murder;
Turning and turning, half-dead? Like an image of Her,
Turning. And turning, and yearning and learning : There isn’t much left anymore.
Only agèd moss-covered green steps, an executioner’s block, Louche Metaphysics — the Judges — austere and contorted, Inverted like wrongly-washed wooly jumpers, all stand or float in a line.
Self-arraigned to their court I force out a grin: ‘Absurd, as we know, I tried to bleed once again, For to swallow Him thus, as He is, is... The truth is, I am unsure if I can...’ All that there is is the scaffold ahead.
The empty shan’t bleed, but that is Absurd, so it must,
Until the very last page of my last definition it must, I have still breath in my lungs and the Will in my jaw,
And in hanging me so, Truth pulls me up by my chin.
Through black-spotted vermilion She is such: If in vain I did climb, did I stand, did I burn,
In vain I am strung, am I judged, do I turn.