Of course he’s drunk, and writing who knows what.
The scribbles of a half hearted hooligan
Convinced of genius. But what’s all that genius
When all victuals become a luxury?
He cries, sometimes, and Lord help him… but worse
Than tears are those poems. Oh, God, help Us
(Not him) when poems are the medium,
His madness overtakes him then, which is a shame,
For he’s not always mad. Sometimes he’s quite sweet,
Sometimes, even, a good father, loving husband,
Sometimes, even, a hardworking, honest man.
-
I shudder when I think one day I awoke
Quite less pretty than before, with sagging skin
And aching back. And children at my feet.
And he, the grand romantic, great seafarer,
More like a wizened wizard from some old
Fairy book, big bearded, base and beastly—
And then that drink! Good lord, the whiskey stench
That levitates like smoky wisps out of his breath.
Behind those drunken tears of his I see
The same desire from his late youth’s failures:
To know and thus be known. He writes to speak,
And speech, he thinks, is some salvific thing.
-
Me, I seldom speak—little left to say.
You’re born, live, die, watching others do the same.
Some are taken more brutally than others.
I watch the nation now at war and mourn
The loss of Brothers losing Brothers,
But whether in war for some grand, noble cause
Or a Baltimore knife-fight down by the docks
It amounts to the same idiocy.
-
I can’t think like this. I shouldn’t even think.
I’m sounding a lot like him. I’d like to eat,
But there isn’t food to eat.
Were I to speak… no, no, no, no. But if I did,
Were I to speak, I think my brains would leak,
And I’d run raving mad and they would shut me up—
Literally and less-but-still-literally—
And what good would that do? No good at all.
Better I shut myself up, then, for dignity’s sake,
Much like him, in that sweat-stained office of his,
With those papers none may read save
Himself and the Good Lord.
-
Does God fancy our struggle
To speak with the tools He gave us?
May He find those poems amusing, then—
—I certainly don’t.
