The Elitist
with The Explanation
When I consider how my life was spent
Exploring islets of the seas of chance,
When I consider how my heart was rent
By vegetable love: such twining plants
As grow along the beach
And ply their stems
And grow beyond my reach
As love condemns,
Yes, when I think on things as sad as these,
My conscience melts like butter in the pan
I weep for loss - the words lost on the breeze
In tempest-torn tornados may not scan.
Perhaps they were not said
Perhaps no tongue
Their tortured sense could wed
To psalms unsung.
But unsaid words do not elucidate
The fields of sense. O, metric citadels
That stand alone with single open gate,
Ring out into the dark some wilder bells,
They ring within a dream
As if in pain
But listen! Now they seem
To answer, and
Explain :-
EXPLANATION
A Critique
by Beau Thai, Bund C.
A moment's quiet reflection
Must show that I am right
In stressing our enchantment
I undermine our plight.
A question of an evening
A fragment of a song
May emphasize our rightness
But show you're wrong.
It follows from this premise
This house of ill-repeat
A domus with a promus
A chair without a seat.
Unthinkable cessation
Unbearable disdain
A moment's explanation
Is all that will remain.
For after all, you must admit, the Arquebus is gone
No solemn upright hero has been found to solder on
Nor can you doubt, my lad, the Duke of Gloucester's name is John.
But what has happened since?
I couldn't help it, after all, I'm really not to blame
The culprit is the Rymer with the C in every name
these poems are no different from the Fathom - we've no shame.
We feel no need to wince.
For after all, you must agree, the authors are the same
The rules remain unaltered; the umpire's left the game
The lines are written thusly in the same alternate frame.
It matters not who cheats.
I couldn't help it if the marmoset became a swan
If Buddha's eye on you and I had shattered as it shone
If Margelet looks madder, well, the Welder's looking wan,
We've kept them off the streets.
O Meredith, my soul is running out
The sands of time are covered by the tide
That washes all my mem'ry with its waves
And leaves me clean as one who never lied.
And all my twenty lives are as but one,
My twenty hearts in crystal counterpoint
And all my dreams within a single mind
In happy harmony the skies anoint.
Upon a shipless ocean I have sailed
And phosphorescent waters have I seen
And I have dreamt of a thousand storks in flight
A metaphysicist clad all in green.
And twenty thousand beaks have pecked the walls
Of trackless youth, and battered down the cage
That holds my soul protected from the world
And singing citadels of artless age.
O Meredith, my soul is at its ebb,
The waters of contagion iridesce
And on-deserted beaches, stranded now,
Are husks of untold truths we cannot guess.
ENVOI
The silent cries of antelopes that men have never found
The beer-soaked tome of poetry upon my burial-ground
The magic flights of dream gazelles that haunt my failing sight:
I laid to rest a rhizome, and it grew a tree of light!
The Lutine forest now is felled, and corn grows in its place
But still the sea is heard as night comes down
And in the dark I seem to see some long-lost lovers face -
She used to have a name. Iii purple gown
She gleaned the fields of truth, such was her tender grace.
She turned her tender heart from me, left in me a space
And turned away the scholar from the clown.
My exile is a broken back, a body less a spine
My life a useless thread of night spun days
My soul is like a shattered vase, a bottle without wine
A bladeless oar, a cycle out of phase.
Created have I nothing, I have left unworked the mine
I cry alone for rabbits: let the honeysuckle twine
About me now, in cruel unspiralled ways.
In desert sand to irrigate we could appreciate
The methods not attempted for so long
By weeping washerwomen by the lake to irrigate
The meeting we postponed from going on
We hurried past our destiny, we feared we would be late.
My sins are none, and none my deeds - I cannot expiate
Your eaten bodies, purple cloak to don.
The ships in which explorers came, a legion lost to life,
Have crossed the far horizon, off the page
And those not) dead from scurvy were all victims to the knife
Their tired souls remain upon the stage.
The masts are bare save tattered sails. My fear before the fife,
The miniaturist mates the mole, the wombat was his wife.
The open frame is open still, but locked and barred my cage.