Poet's Folly

[Poem XXIII]

A lyric on my Art, written much like a monologue; an attempt (likely inadequate) to explain why I write. It would not be wrong to say that the content is undeniably personal and delivered quite forthrightly. Yet there pervades an inherent sense of high-flown irony: a poet's folly, the certitude of which he knows all too well and ignores just the same.


My supreme endeavour is to form the perfect sentence,
to compact infinity of thought—every thought—into a single phrase;
my design would see all beauty, agony and apathy subsumed into a verse.

I lust after the Sun, seeking to steal its undying warmth, its imperial splendour, its illimitable power—
I wish to place these on a page, a thing of littleness and impermanence,
there for all to read and ever to be read.
And to pluck the Moon from the sable sky-canvas,
to pour its romance and lambency into every impression of my pen—or whatever the delivery of my Impartations.

In the midst of Night I have contorted dreams, sculpted with scalpel their scene-sequences;
I have whispered things to myself that just as soon as they flourish flit away so bittersweetly.
In the chaotic wake of these fragments of entire lifetimes are my lines realised.

And horrors, grand grotesqueries: each new nightmare conceived with every step I take;
the chimeric Ideas that wrench themselves free from insubstantial chamber walls—
they are the Visions and the Voices, desiring worlds for their own.

Were my words to birth—birth as stars die—in the minds of others,
coming into that inexplicable existence that they yearn for,
it would quiet the continual intrusion of querulous imagery.

All of life is to me great poetry.

In every neglected sight there is a scrap of a poem waiting to be written;
in every furtive glance; in every meandering conversation: a tangential remark,
a disclosed truth that otherwise would never have been spoken aloud.
There is no epic greater than a man growing up, looking back and growing old;
no elegy more heart-rending than one of a death yet to occur—
the Ballad of One is the Ballad of All.
In me, these are already written:

My supreme endeavour is to form the perfect sentence—

M.M. — December MMXI; Ianuarius MMXII