Poem: February in Four Stanzas

I. A Time of Season

February (with its attendant terrors) always comes with a fury

Loneliness
Loathing

(That peculiar wasteland we call boredom)

Imposes its will upon the broken heart

Until

Finally

All comes collapsing

Bursting forth

With its futility and envy and senses deprived

What I would give for a moment on the Piazza Navona

(Watching lovers on motorbikes navigate through the catacomb streets of Rome)

What I would give for a moment in Hollywood Cemetery

(At the foot of a famous writer’s grave, basking in the breeze of the River James)

Yes, the fury comes

At night, clutching at my blankets
Fists clenched in poetic nervous strain
My left arm twitching in response to the psychic biting of the emotional parasite

It comes with the cold
It comes with the wall of snow driven by the lake effect winds
It comes with the emptiness at night

The emptiness of being forgotten by life

It comes with the dead horse

Euthanized

Like a good Kentucky Derby winner

It comes with the dead celebrity

Eulogized

With a bosom Western close-up

It comes with the rain-slicked lies

That falls with ease

Upon the numbed breasts of a bottle-fed electorate

It comes

And we must endure or suffer or maintain

Despite the ugliness which dwells deep in the inhuman heart

It comes

And we must sleep secure in our sleeplessness

It comes


II. A Twist of Fate

Forty years ago today (You could look it up)

I moved with my family to a new town

Where I died for twenty-five years

The hatreds of the hunters
The anger of the huntresses

The evil which lurked between the suburban tracts
And the highway

The evil that smote me dawn to dusk

The evil that emptied and corrupted and corroded

Until there was nothing left when I finally left

To revisit the crime scenes
And the bad dreams
And the windscreens

It was never my home

(Lying dead in the child’s playground)

III. The final chord

From little acorns…

A song was born from a fevered mind

Fueled by illicit substances

Inspired by reading the news today Oh Boy!

Sugar-plum fairies in an echo-chamber

Echoes from an old piano

24-bars and the alarm rings

What comes crashing down?

Attenuation

The sound of a chair squeaking

IV. Testimony

Kill me and be done with it
Kill me and bill my estate later
Kill me and sell the rights to my tele-movie
Kill me and show the footage of You Tube

At least Saddam Hussein got a proper send off

(Make sure the noose is to the left of the left ear so that the neck breaks properly)

Like the outlaw Bill Longley said, “Hanging is my favorite way of dying.”

Just ask the Easter Day Rebellion rebels of Ireland

© 02/10/2007 by Matthew DiBiase