Member Poem

A poet in the garret
Saw searing visions of
Eternal whelming flame.
Feverish, he scrawled &
Bawled t the roof - beams,
Lacerated his soul,
Screamed & ached in ecstasies
As the world by him rolled,
Chuffing to the thrum of coal,
Molded by mortal margins
Cast into calamity, fraught
With consumption, filth
And slime: the lifeblood
Beating syphilitic unction,
Mystery the dialect
Of his deified dead.
About his brow flock fires,
Quicksilver beacons of
Arch - angelic apotheosis:
Demiurgic lancets cast
To the four winds of bale.
He eats ether, devours joy,
Derives and distills alchemic
Agonies to beaten blazons
Of gold profane.

His ravings rouse the flop -
House, wake the wretched
From morphine's chimera.
Stirred to anger, they
Storm the august attic
In dead of night - fright
Inflamed, mush - brained
With the gutter's dross,
Clothed in rags of slag and
Avatar from obscene idyll,
His alembic furor for
Beauty bane to their
Hard - won oblivion
They gut aim, geld him.

Rip up reams of dreams,
Despoil his visions with
Hands clammily of clay.
He weeps blood into mud
As argosy transmutes
To entropy, trampling feet
Treading his ashes,
Atoms wrath - tossed to
Ignominy embossed
On spilt ink & ichor - stain:
Death the consummation
Of his ken.

Above, sunlight sears
Moonbeam empyrean,
Annihilation rife.
The poet dies babbling,
Trachea mashed by weal’s
Of boot - heel and fist.
Lethe his legend
And abyss his tryst -
A century hence his
Pauper's plot by
Reverent immortals
Unknowingly kissed.
No stone to demarcate
Bone, no graven grave
To admit his name: Yet,
Even in erasure writ -
The Work is Done.
***