Balm
Although you've been a man of many half-truth-hued words,
By virtue of relying on poetic license to guide your liberty-taking,
None of them has smacked of academic, political, or theological cant.
And yet, as of late,
After having composed free verse for nearly five decades,
You've been having major reservations, questioning the efficacy of words,
Their morality, credibility, ultimate purpose in the hierarchy of reason,
Wondering why you've devoted all your passion
To fashioning, fabricating, from airy scratch and numbing nothingness,
The stuff bards have longed, in their dreams, to create,
In lasting, rapturous passages acolytes might read, recite, and disseminate
As gospels, proverbs, scriptural wisdom
Capable of lifting spirits from the squalor of human depravity,
Letting mere mortals slip off their mantles of mediocrity,
Jettison their petty or base hypocrisies, atone for their inanities, profanities,
Come to believe in the awesome command of the word writ large
In the service of worship to a higher cause — art —
And have faith in the omnipotent omniscience of the Lord God of Metaphor.
But for quite some indeterminate agony of time, now,
You've not only quit reading literature, newspapers, public graffiti,
Quit listening to all forms of speech, articulation, animalistic utterance,
But quit writing altogether —
Not a solitary consonant or vowel, word, sentence, stanza, poem —
Having retreated to the holy precincts of your soul's silence,
Trusting only in the promising balm of illiteracy's healing grace,
Which suffuses those who seek blessed ignorance,
To restore you to the perfect innocence that was yours before conception.
03/28/10 - (2)
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