After
Dec 01 '02
The Bottom Line This is the poem that people will look back at and say, "That was the start of an epic career." This is a "Thanatopsis" for the new millenium.
After
Away from the marbled mourners, standing each like a mutant
drunk on its own radioactivity, a piano genius who awakes to
discover his hands have become mole paws in the night;
the gilled, painted lips of the widow locked in a garlic grimace, everyone sucking like sugar-t!ts their own private kernels of grief; away from all of that, out of the full-mouthed cemetery, with its trees posing like fashion plates, through and out of a banzai bazaar of meadow flowers, spreading their fragrance like paranoia, bull terrier dumping its load under a gorse bush, who holds the look of an illuminati, sunbeams slinking like weasels,
swarmed by lightstruck memories, pace I, like a family dog who beholds his Master's lovemaking and savvies only its animal essence, if that.
Down past the townspeople, a rubbernecking devil in a fresh, mediagenic Paradise, who know only themselves and their toggled smiles, their decaled virtues, their individual passions strangled like chickens,
each armored with purpose, like shoguns, yet slim as papercuts; cars crawling like icebergs, their passengers grotesquely preserved. None of them knows that keen, candid grief which swallows the stars like krill, and pinches the earth, a scintilla, beneath its thumb. They are, every one, like a man blindfolded, bound, drugged, and beaten beyond his senses, who accepts whatever is given him, because it is all that is given, and believes whatever he is told,
because it must be true.
But as for them, for us all, for myself, it hangs, scrolled across the sky, affording us no privacy, like an autograph-hunter, hot for the final stamp, smearing the windows with its obscene nostrils. And then it will come, like a bluff called, a kraken through the gloaming, towing in its haunting tentacles an eternity of gauzy eye-winks,
and we are delivered on that slavering, sought-after shore, clutching the reins of our shrill, barking nerves, blessed with anonymity. And the oarsman holds us aloft, like a goblet before the quaff, for inspection, all the secret parts of this gasping, wet, after-birth smothered, kreeching creature. And he squats with damp pits,
dragon breath, and a skin mag tucked beneath the thwart
for the wait, the oars spread like waiting thighs, to conduct us across the river into the obsolete enormity of His Presence.
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Member: William R. Bradbury
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