My Unromantic

I love the flavor from the window,

Dripping with unrepeated answers,

Like a shadow asked

If black was its only blouse.

It whispers crinkled notes to me,

And overrides the elsewhere sounds.

--

Sliding back to relevance, I falter

On the border of speech and babble—

Unlike Armstrong’s trumpet,

So clear and charismatic—

My voice a flooding static

As I croak of my existence.

But words, mumbling,

Now tumbling

From my mouth like rocks down a slope,

Have a life of their own, a life of their own,

And I swear I have no say.

--

And yet my window basks exuberance,

Its curtains moving

Like clever fingers over keys:

White to white and white to black, again,

A uniformed creation in my head…

But answer me my voice and call me dead,

For I live not while I misinterpret life.

--

Therefore these hands I wind, these hands I rule,

Measure empires of indisputable strength,

With a stubbornness to press on, press on,

Through war and love and birth and death—

And stop.

I have no say, I fear I have no say.

--

Lofty halls, sweet-filled and high,

Lit with four thousand candles,

Forever burning, never doused.

And the flames approach my steel-bent fingers,

Because they’re closer than the hills,

Than the rivers, the oceans, stilled,

And they say, ‘We thought you dead,

We thought you gone,’

As the curtains play their song…

--

But I stop. I stop stop stop.

With a beat thrumming behind me,

And a drum whose skins are hiding

Somewhat binding with their arms,

And these words continue in the space—

The place my stuttering left void—,

Average syllables with nothing to live for,

Nothing to gain since their escape

From my indecisive prattle—

And I swear I have no say

(They wouldn’t listen anyway).

--

But Eliot’s words—his words aren’t my own,

Though they whiz through my skull

Like traffic uncontrolled—

Unrolled, unraveled, determined to brand me

With some splash of Truth that will burden my muse.

Collectively separate,

These lists and terms—these tools of tongue—

Scatter like birds at a gunshot as I try, I try

To recreate a feeling through the art that is language.

But alas, I have no say,

And I sleep to dream an end.

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