Follysophy
Poetic form is the innocence of the grandiose.
ALAIN BADIOU
Today I feel altogether unbuttoned.
I rejoice in these vast barrens of white
And, you will understand, transform them
In the expansive tracts of my genius.
If you were to try to flatter me
With bardic vocables and sepia verse,
I should object.
I think I shall sing,
In a variety of forms, of light,
Of sincerity, and of love, of course.
Oh, please. I don’t give a shit for love.
Fashion for me a desolate confection.
I feel the need of a substantial torte,
Lightly powdered with desperation.
Crooked gums under snow? The light falling
All afternoon? My large and tragic face
In the glass?
I am no longer young.
My soul unravels to infinity as I contemplate
The woman I loved in the naked presence
Of a handsome fellow, come upon
In silence and with joy.
As in the dark
We are afraid. As we wake. Opening,
Again and again, our soft and empty hands.
I cannot move. For the moment I am draped
In glacial distress. I can see the grand,
Groundless abyss under the dispassionate eye
Of vacant heaven. I can smell the nape
Of the neck of despair. It is coming to fasten me
In a tender embrace.
How the banded lapwing
Whistles, fatherless, from the plain?
You know,
Love seemed the grandest plan of them all.
Perhaps the heart is simply too small.
It may be. Tough I can’t tell for real.
I find it hard to imagine the stark
Language of a large and foundering body.
What I see is an array of banks and streamers,
Patches of light, and hanging draperies.
I will expand, I think, at the last, through the sadness.
See these slender rivers of ionospheric grief,
The noctilucent clouds and the vast desolation.