An old-time, small-town hardcore "con" polite enough to jigger mint juleps in tinking silver cups rubbed smooth by lips ribbed smooth with talking. Politics, aesthetics, jeremiads, history's candid tangle of catastrophes --any subject that nights ripen and split enough to show the sense of meaning at the snapping seams; thought stretched taut until articulation sang. O the million nights chattered ruefully through to human truth! Rhythm's doubled thrubs send the heart-beacon out beneath the boards, like your troubled and beloved Poe moaning lonely for his Annabelle Lee, lovely ideal resurrected from the dead real. Your life-plot's coiled as Rosencrantz', a labyrinthine mind of steel and twine following each God-doled bread-crumb clue to God's appointed apotheosis; intent as a atheist pimping out a principle. You loiter with stories forever unfinished, once started, not knowing "how way leads on to way." Each enunciated principle's broadened with tributary amendments, altering precursor and course upon reconsideration; Rabelaisian babble nipped and tucked tidy by a laser-guided philosophy. Long ago in your yeoman youth you started dreaming past the dragon's hiss, the dragon's tooth, to inner virtue's unvarying, vibrant truth. Now an earnest father gone haggard at the world's lies-- you sit a spastic Little Hamnu down to talk-- and finish grinning and whistling in the dark, stuck, like Coleridge with his quaint Constancy, or an aim-awry Orion facing West, stark as a marker in the stars' fixed rigging.
Sep 142011