Then, with a weak hand, he wrote:
‘I must stop dreaming, I am nearly seventeen,
To forge that grand old age bespoke
I mustn’t rest in an evocation wisdom has yet seen
Or in these recitals of trickery; on parole I tote,
Reclaiming a vision my brows set and clean,
To trim loft droppings that rise across Dawn’s boat:
Is maturity merely the itches of what could\'ve been?
Where by one must fashion a senseless coat?
Ah, I am naked and the lion struts his claws on sand so lean
On dryness breaking, pilgrimages waking: make weight of this half-skinned goat!’
The Father upturns his snout,
I have come to know the normality of kings;
The Mother crafts a decrepit pout,
I have come to enamour the stillness she brings;
The Brother is split by parting grout,
I have come to listen to the song my heart sings;
The Girl waves in her familiar stout,
I have come to hate the isolation of wings;
The boy remains untouched in a timeless bout,
I have came to immortalise these healed stings,
His hands are tired, but fated desire sees him out!
The hull of secondary thoughts conceit the sight,
Sunrise is left in a sprawling heat, a quivering mess
And shells of flesh dangle from the rouge clouds, an angel’s delight;
Melpomene’s indignation is configured in the sky’s encompass
And I see myself in old age, perfectly bright
And full of abominable youth, so sly my age may be less;
Was the soil sewn breath? Ah, to bask like a virgin before the light!
As submissive as a druid, a blind man before lambs on warm grass
Thought not apart of it — I hired a play of performers in my mind and set them alight;
Throats and Lionskins ribbed the stage, the heart is ashes of carnal from a player’s congress
And a manuscript is left untouched by a Playwright:
‘It’s death in idleness, the fool’s crusade of Dawn’s height,
Enwrought in speculation. Resurrection has become a daily pass
And children are rendered thick with mane and fight,
Beseeching themselves for roars that would echo and confess
The liars present of stutter and blight;
Starving organs and lecherous loins grieve in chaste
And a dry-red-skin amphibian howls wildly through the night
Seeking the grove that would abort him from peripheral excess
And ethereal caress, that burns softly within his scalp chipped tight:
But, a naked boy flushed of any rage tugs at him through the looking glass.’
Now, with a strong hand, he writes.