Narcissus, Emeritus

Narcissus lifts his gaze and cranes his neck to see what he can see;
He twists his neck so painfully
What crystal pure eyes frozen
Imploded by sensations overflowing!

He sees everything through frosted blue
Each wall is transparent
And he taps on every window
But no one hears
He reaches inside of us and is lost in the void and the maze of memory.
Sweet memory
mirth and joy!
To hear the youthful voices
Of fields where once he lay.

Buffered by time
Memories so precise
Sensation of deepening fabric.
Laughter rings out,
The laughter is real though years have flown,
His cruel sentence has ended,
Fleeting beauty lingers on.

Up and away from his magic pool
He turns creaking knee
Takes leave silently
Banishing the zone to grey-white abstraction.

Narcissus Retiring
not skulking away,
at last retreat
From the feathery grasses silkily sliding in aquafingers’ grasp.

Beauty's Power

Do not hesitate to bow before this Beauty
when she speaks she breeds nonsense,
vain imaginings and lies.

This woman who with muse conspires to wreath the young poet in laurel garlands.
To confine his bloody scribble to the legislation of Mephistopheles
Thus in gift and in this rejoicing;
In early hours he spins the piper's pipe
until time's foul hand scratches back a tangle of years and days
to reveal this stone indenture cast in granite epitaph.

"No more, no more!" cries the poet,
"I am blown as wind and free as night"
Free to paint with borrowed oils
captive to unbridled lust---bitter mead, vengeance, jealousies...
You are pressed in foreign service
debt hefting higher than the offal and passion discard
peeling skin tossed orgies and drunks.

You sniff after blood as a black hound
Ambition plots the futility and waste of liberty.
It is license, not dignity that you seek.

A nation of security's slaves in comfort bound,
slaves of slaves to luxury's highway.
Unwitting executives to the devil's lair entrapped
Unknowing the forge of this pale religion,
when the beast rouses to orgy or feast
to plot lives of innocents
to spill the cup and bloody the hall.

Then reason's tame horses are driven to fury
by fire's threatening lashes
and science is a whore.
University chancellors and provosts pimp learning
to satisfy a corporate throng lustfull.
And commend with degree and virtue
their wasted delegation.
Medicine falls ill from its own side-effects.
Lawyers mock Justice in her fair reign
and ministers and priests fall under the yoke of dull business
forging one nation under the corporate plow.

Prophets enraged watch the political debauch
whose drunken chiefs establish world command
to export vile immorality and circuses
bridling the Pale now the Red horse.
Sages and consultants
loyal minions
interpret sacred constitutions
in order to entangle America
on the road to Armageddon.