The Virginal Boy

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.