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
R.M. ENGELHARDT 