Tag Archives: Poems By R.M. Engelhardt

 

In the time of the world’s night, the poet utters the holy

~ Heidegger

Broken.

Like the words or like the song

Or like the man or like the poem

His muse, his wife, his dog

And if it ain’t gonna walk

It begs

It crawls

And will eventually die

Alone.

Solitary-slow, old & torn up,

Soul screaming like some bloody

Blood drenched pathetic heart or like

The sonnet that once ached now lost

That once breathed new life into the void

This universe

Still spinning

But dead

Like Gods.

The history of the poem now only

The mere echo and the ghost fuck of

The shell-shocked & the literary damned

All of them

Silent, still secretly whispering

To themselves

In libraries

Over books

Around the world

All of them,

Still wanting the words

All reaching with their new formalist minds

And still secretly dreaming

And waiting for the return of

Sirens to come and save them

A messiah, or

A muse.

And lo, as I walk thru this valley of despair

I still hope that there be some cigarettes

There, or perhaps some literary corpses with

Anything interesting left to say

In all of these

Silent & dead verse days

Repeating and repeating

Again.

For it is not enough

To write or to see, or to believe –

To become this disease or feel it

To become a now love,

A now hope which

No longer breathes with

Too many stars forgotten

Still clinging to it’s lost beauty

And truth.

So Dear Poem

Saint Poem,

I ask you

To please see us through yet another day

And may to thee I pray with the words that

Doth flow like a river, a dream like inspiration

With this lost voice, a generation

Forgotten and left behind

Or like a prophet

Who has lost what

Remains of his soul

And his mind

For in the beginning?

We only know that there was no heaven

Or earth but only the words, the hipsters,

And the rebellion, the beginning of the cool

As the nocturnal music past midnight blared

Of jazz & revolutions that guided its

Disciples in leather jackets

Who only lived & wrote

For you.

As you,

Saint Poem

Saint Muse

Sung the blues alone

In the starry night

Like a transmission

To the damned

And the unaccepted

Lost

But where are you now

Saint Poem, Saint Muse?

Where are you now?

To see, to sing of this humanity

Living in the streets

Living un-alive un-dead,

Scattered & trapped here

In a new century

Without light

Where are you now

Saint Poem?

To tell us that

The human heart

Isn’t dead that the myth

Isn’t dead just yet?

As we

The poets

The prophets

And the every

Day dreamers

Of ordinary

Wait

As we

The workers

The lovers

And all the

False salesmen

Of shit

No one wants

Are still waiting

For the next

Awakened

Breathing time

Of creation

Among all these

Forgotten stars

Lost, in their

Forgotten realms

Still, always returning

Back home again with

The same damn

Fucking song

Drunk & alone

And singing The

Resurrection Waltz

Once more

And again

To themselves.

______________

R.M.  ENGELHARDT 

FROM THE RESURRECTION WALTZ, 2012