A poet is Born

A poet is born

A poet dies

And all that lies between

is us

and the world

And the world lies about it

making as if it had got his message

even though it is poetry

but most of the world wishing

it could just forget about him

and his awful strange prophecies

Along with all the other strange things

he said about the world

which were all too true

and which made them fear him

more than they loved him

though he spoke much of love

Along with all the alarms he sounded

which turned out to be false

if only for the moment

all of which made them fear his tongue

more than they loved him

Though he spoke much of love

and never lived by ‘silence exile & cunning’

and was a loud conscientious objector to

the deaths we daily give each other

though we speak much of love

And when such a one dies

even the agents of Death should take note

and shake the shit from their wings

in Air Force One

But they do not

And the shit still flies

And the poet now is disconnected

and won’t call back

though he spoke much of love

And still we hear him say

‘Do I not deal with angels

when her lips I touch’

And still we hear him say

‘0 my darling troubles heaven

with her loveliness’

And still we hear him say

‘As we are so wonderfully done with each other

We can walk into our separate ‘sleep

On floors of music where the milkwhite cloak

of childhood lies’

And still we hear him saying

‘Therefore the constant powers do not lessen

Nor is the property of the spirit scattered

on the cold hills of these events’

And still we hear him asking

‘Do the dead know what time it is?’

He is gone under

He is scattered

undersea

and knows what time

but won’t be back to tell it

He would be too proud to call back anyway

And too full of strange laughter

to speak to us anymore anyway

And the weight of human experience

lies upon the world

like the chains of the ‘sea

in which he sings

And he swings in the tides of the sea

And his ashes are washed

in the ides of the sea

And ‘an astonished eye looks out of the air’

to see the poet singing there

And dusk falls down a coast somewhere

where a white horse without a rider

turns its head

to the sea