Elliot

Elliot

That rhythm, drum beat of the rock show, the thrumming fingers at the séance table with hope palpable in the air but receding as steam or the hangover fog from the night’s joy and pursuits.

Tired minds and timid surety.

How much should we reassure ourselves before we are completely unwound and stored in the ground?

Harvest of hair and drought, the great extinction upon the earth as our yellow smoke and clammy over medicated skin can be peeled in sheets.

We can be used for manufacturing.

We can be stuck like a stake in the ground but unlike trees we can’t grow from one place

and stay all the time.

We can talk a while.

Tell of the ribbon road and blood soaking, the travail, humous, laying in of the dead,

the sometimes song as a grapple and nipple of nimbus clouds and greater sleep.

The plough moves the furrows.

The waves close before the ship and expand behind as it moves away. T.S. Eliot said so.

Old England, sods of Harvard and the review. Warm to your blankets old men.

The prolegomenon of the other tongues, the lashes of symphony and eye lids like brain lids,

opening, closing, sinking.

The church steps worn thin as the temple stones shined by the knees of prostate pilgrims.

The muses grin as smoke in an attic room. The situation becomes quite desperate and dire.

The gowned Dons read on, passages as from the illuminated manuscript four inches thick.

A reading of the bills. We could be here all night hungering for bacon or woman or yet more sleep.

And when the slim time is upon us as a vision, sound really of a thrush or tit I the brush chirping, who really has the time to deconstruct bird song for the common feed and the elevation of parliament.

Who but you old white man. Who but your books up late at night rubbing your feet. Who but the mid-day meal, mushy and English style, who but insomniac clairvoyants with nervous fingers and reminders tacked to the fridge.

More dishes to be done.

More laundry.

The hired help is dear and left alone one has daunting scope for projects never begun.

It will take Andrew Lloyd Weber to finally bring it off, on stage a maximalist work of minor feelings, hebetude, hesitation before negritude and the world.

The slick chain or greased twine around a neck or bundled grass – hay tied tight with twine.

Forgive me now with the impertinence to finally strike you down, already safe and dead and mostly digested.

It’s a gristle meal of the thick ham and cold hard toast. The tea goes tepid.

Hands before a lover a search and find nothing bold enough to say, yet pass the time we do y deference, soliloquy for the modern age with just enough humor and mystery to be palatable.

Outgrown your suit in service to the scholars.

Are the pants tight or is it the shoulders wasting away, thinning like two days past shave.

Less choosey now, any phrase in a pinch.

Drop a name.

Pound long since wronged from fascist pride to dementia and the tinkling dominos on a glass table. Beyond putting the politics of resentment back in order.

Life amid the ruins of a proving and glorious failure of sense. A lack of the common touch yet brought so low like the rubble of the wars, the sureness of rebuilding the blocks of the Builder’s Arms and the thick black pints everyone needs sometimes.

A song for the girls.

A post war grill or pride of place on the islands of the pond, a sure footedness in Newfoundland austere as the old boards and staves still in the ground by the stacked stones of some other North Atlantic home.

The native nail menders, the original people of the Saxon Celts, the bog people, the sheep gut song and squeezed bag pipe of your Lenten days and sacrifice.

Starvation. Another pass.

A circle in the square of bent over books and night monks disturbed by worry.

A grand island page, stones put to use

and as the plot turns on yet another war who is but grief, a sieve for the living tears catching sinews of fat in it’s hot wires.

No wonder that no one can sleep.

Bombers, bathroom breaks, toast and the back fill as land claimed with gravel from the fen,

moist on the window pane, a drizzle, everywhere democratic to mold our sills and shed the chill with a chub – fire of wet sticks and bacon grease.

Rolf's Poems and Pictures

Comments

Elliot — No Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply