What’s wrong? (A Poem in Five Parts)

I.

It starts to get worse
(Now they never relent).

He thought that it could never get worse; he thought
if he maintained,
persevered,
in perfect silent harmony,
he might be rewarded.

But the sky is falling!
watch out,
as the tiles fall away
and crush hopes and dreams and people and towns and
leave not a rack behind.

In their stead?

A madman
longing
for power
chains his only daughter to a rock,
leaves her for the beast.
But Perseus does not come for her.
He,
in the wrong place at the right time,
unwittingly loses Andromeda
to the howling deep.

Take my hand!
I will pull you into the midst of
words and wings
and out of what should be.

So we lie
between the lines
of text, messily scrawled
that
in the mirror
spin a tale of what could have been.
What should have been,
maybe.
Rightly?
Hardly.

But, I implore you!
Don't take my words
which bear my taint
Take my songs
(of what I'm without)
or take my life
(which hardly bears semblance to any life at all).

I am not a fighter,
nor a bird,
nor free to my whim,
but a prisoner
of my own fabrications,
of my own lies.

What am I?

It means something
for me to do all this talking
so I mean something by association.

II.

Very professional, that one.
Straight-laced, if you will.
He lives in lines and boxes
and in pinstripes.

But, at night,
his voice is
too low
too soft
too desperate
to be heard.

And, thus,
on and on and out
his body goes
in and again
through offices
through monotony, though
his soul
remains with her.

Professionalism gets him nowhere.

He wishes that he were sixteen again.
He wants just to ask her
something long forgotten.

III.

So, this is what it's like?
To be happy, I mean.
It's hard to know
where that threshold lies.

It's never complete, for one thing.
In all of life's give and take
you have to lose something.
Is it worth it?

Ask Hamlet.
Ask Faust.
Ask Heracles.
Or else ask me.
How candidly,
How tempered,
How false,
How long?

End it.
For her. For the world.

IV.

How does that rage
which envelops your mind
burn?

Is it cold and slow?
Is it as an angry blade?

I storm off
with eyes clouded by desire,
away from an angel
and so out of hell.

We are tempted, you and I,
to be.
I gave in
long ago.

Now, I want
life where it's not.

Leave me!
Let me alone,
or loose
me to the winds

but don't keep me, Andromeda, Calypso, whatever you are,
Don't hold me in thrall
at the gates of purgatory
Let me go to Lethe.
Let me forget.

V.

I wish this were not happening
I grow old,
or long
And in doing so, damn myself
with every passing second.