In dark, unguarded moments
I sense the potent rush of torments past,
a flush of bloated melodrama
cavalcades of censors seething,
thrusting manners down my throat
to throttle back my breathing.

I miss those rants and rages;
no euphemisms, paraphrases
nothing short of all-out war
on every narrow mind that went before,
and culture queens that wiped the floor
with bile and spleen recited
from my febrile screen.

My ego rocked, the good times roled
I pawned my suicidal soul
for spews of swallowed pride
that taunted me until I cried black tears,
decanted pathos spiked with pain
that left me wet between the ears
and primed for squirting poetry again.

An arbitrary line
break here
a bold ellipsis there...
parentheses to capture
(life's chemical catastophes, love's digest of despair)
and every one a killer
sensibilities dispatched without a care,
a world of lust and blood and gore
exploded into smithereens of rapture.

White nights spent, the gloom to follow;
days that promised no tomorrow,
yet another crisis of identity
distilling the collective i from royal we,
enshrined within the sanctity of lowercase
apologists for stanzas sprawling in disgrace.

O dour muse! Pray name your price.
Posess me with a new device
to punctuate this plaintive panoply
with something more than mere apostrophe.

Now armed with invective, I answered
my calling, a cultural quest;
take the high moral ground
to an all-time low,
and, so she told me, way to go.

But that was way back yesterday
when fire and ice wrought disarray,
and surely there are more or less
important matters to address?

The abstracts, the absurdities,
the myriad of mysteries,
all honoured in scenarios
of finely measured ebbs and flows.

Masterpieces mired in metrics
rhythms steeped in antiseptics,
tasteful rhymes to understress
the subtle flavours of finesse.

The mighty wry supplanting corn;
a gape of awe--or did I yawn?

A form of torture, sentiment stretched
to spread the word, so nearly far-fetched.

Does anything satisfy poets in need?
Well let's face it, we writers are hung up on greed
so, the best of both worlds—guess that's no big surprise;
and the worst? We get stuffed with a false compromise.

Still, I can't deny an insidious craving
to waive goodbyes
and wave hi
to that literary terrorist
alive and squealing
for cathartic self-indulgence
pouting egocentric vehemence
that innervates my dreams
by splashing through streams of vitriol
to rejoice at the drowning of protocol
in the gold light of day
at the end of a screw-you-all rainbow.

01/14/2009

Author's Note:
Edited 02-03-14 [UK date format]

Posted on 01/14/2009
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