Soft, museless voices have I touched of late,

That strike the woven strings of my elation

At such a frequency that I have greatly 

Felt the shuddering of their resonation;

Such voices startle artful men at night

While half-awake, they watch the hours pass;

Espresso-driven hours that force their rhymes,

And hold sway on them all; on me no less.

Not still small voices: No! Cacophonous horns!

A slow fanfare crescendo in the night

Surpassing all, so vibrant and so clear

Upon the midnight air within my ear–

A wall of water rushing through the dark

Toward shores that long ago or recently

Have known each atom, every molecule

Within that deluge surging for them now.

When as a child I played upon those sands

As children often do, I ran in fear –

No, not fear; but rather mild discomfort –

From the unknown chilling froth that ’sieged the beach.

But just as most discover in the course

Of happy or unhappy accident,

(I’ll call mine happy; so it seems right now),

The chill of the tides recedes with each new wave;

With passing time we grow used to the change,

So that, at length, I am become the beach

That once I strode upon just yesteryear;

The sand, unchanging in itself, but changed –

Ever-changed with even a gentle breeze,

The footstep of a gull, the swimmer’s stroke…

The beach inhales new sand, exhales old sand,

(Though ‘new’ and ‘old’ are momentary terms)

And so, with every passing charged ripple

The beach assumes a newer identity:

So it is that I… indeed, that WE

Adapt and are reborn from hour to hour.

Oh, Mind! That I may museless string the notes

Together in a semi-pleasant manner,

To sing of what once was, what cannot be.

For most muses beget cancers, ailments,

Deformities in the progeny of whosoever

Falls to their sweet song. The easy way

Is fraught with all disease, not for the poet,

But for the ones who live beyond the day –

The very hour, when sighing he joins the sand.

And like a common cold, it spreads before

The first signs show in the progenitor;

But more the spirochete than common cold,

Results in bloody excrement and gall

For those who cannot by themselves resist

Before the plague has struck them at the throat.

Oh, Mind! That I may find my own true voice

Unsteered by any muse — nor any mind, but you!

Not wretched souls, we wandering museless few,

Who late in evening find their chisels dulled;

But souled wretches — ‘wretches’ covers all –

Who spilt our lifeblood forth into the craft,

At once to find the well-worn page was red

‘Ere we began… What’s left to do but carve

The Meanings out, sort red from deeper red?

For those who shed their blood with me today

(You brothers, whom I never knew, nor will)

On the page of a vast canon, growing vaster –

The Hero’s golden blood flows not in us.

The Masters of eras past would quake indeed

To see their graceful art reduced to tatters:

Abstract mosaics depicting other mosaics

Whose cracks and lines are far more worthy

Than the content squeezed between them.

As for me? I have not been a beacon to the masses:

I have not been a city on a hill.

I have not seen the mermaids in the ocean,

Nor touched the Happy Isles.

Never will I pour water from the iron basin
On the old neglected jewel of humankind

To see the lightning billow forth and kindle

Fires upon the meadows in the evening hours.

Nor will I gallop over mountainsides

As did the old young one by the sylvan Wye.

But I will count my days out in aluminum tins

Of diced leaves and gently embalming chemicals

And rest my head beneath a tobacco tree

Counting the ants that crawl along my legs

Toward the bottle of spent dreams that still I clutch

In paws worthy of the lowly brooding sloth.

I will draw my breaths through a paper straw

And waterboard myself with milk and honey

To draw from myself such ignoble confessions

That each new breath will be the more bitter.