Gestures of requited idylls wax more mundane as memory and nostalgia render a mere tawdry conjecture. Specious kisses haunt moonlit shadowed halls where scenes of angry passion betray encumbered, false romance. Youth left breathless cannot detach the retinal damage love's imposture optically transposed from ecstatic pain to elastic bitterness and deceit.Let the mask bare the guilt, the thespian stoop for roses!
And yet, with all alacrity we storm the beaches long abandoned in our childhood misgivings. We mourn the passing of halcyon days when castles stood on distant shores of innocence. The wallflowers beckon, the sirens call, hearing only the droning clangor of a mind enrobed in stoic rapture. The shrill report of souls entrammeled in that Gall of Callow, as the band plays on we dance the St. Vitus, we spin stilettos in the snow.
There, dashed upon the rocks the gleam of father’s eye; his wish we should solve love’s conundrums pondered, though we bury them in misty, dank vicissitudes. In caliginous solitude we find our heart a traitor; our love a mere contrivance that degrades us as we tumble, and we fall, and rise again to grasp straws of proud insouciance strewn about the shores of misspent yesterdays.
Let us dance and paint a new milieu with figures from a brighter notion; that perhaps we might attain more perfect knowledge of a sham returned devotion. A semaphore raised up on summer breezes point to stark realities, while question and enigma tie a ligature of self-imposed diversities.
With fettered minds we spin and toil to fashion perfect paradox. A solipsism perched upon tender insights weaving tapestries of indecision and that oh! so splendored intellectual morass!
Is it not the crafty things that cause so great a colic when brought into that effulgent light of a perfect, zealous penance? We ponder an existence cobbled from whole cloth of mendacious platitudes served cold and barren; much like our estimation of bards of old who enchant with impassioned eloquence, their beggarly message left spinning on empty potter's wheels:
'Tis truth, to the end of reckoning!
'Tis life, a walking shadow!
'Tis virtue, chok'd with foul ambition!
And the canker molders in the shadows while the meaning goes unnoticed. It mocks them in their esteemed repose. Feigned enlightened and retiring spent to golden slumbers, only to awaken more obtuse and facile in their righteous contumacy.
Yet, each new day dawns with the hope of better visions, but alas we see through a glass darkly:
the candle burns the shadows deep
gaze upon the question turning
within the instant grasp of sleep
the pain of books we're burning
we hold these truths on slender threads
a stifled, false soliloquy
leave tattooed fictions in our heads
they burn without the urgency
recall the yearning, soft caress
upon the breast of our sweet sorrow
the dead man often says it best
leave the worry for tomorrow
in morning light I'll know my part
take up the staff and follow
wither take me foolish heart
to innocence, or horrow?
On this the equation turns. Our knowing often brings a greater anguish, though cool libations might be bought with but a trinket. Warm, wet circles pockmark the bar, mere dolorous emblems of misfortune and enigma demanding perquisite for their tender. Yet, the coin of the realm too often trades in torrid ignorance with a penchant for rapine, leaving the innocent darling of such altruistic pride bitterly ravished, trailing bile upon those wide, gilded lanes: their signets Sloth and Greed stamped between the hedges. And the wisdom left desolate becomes the swill and effluent we think better to divest from such Kingdoms that might approximate a more perfect penetration, as union is now considered mere epithet!
Indeed, can we tease a brief respite from such dapper, churlish fellows? Is it within our ken to call to dowsing fluids deep and recondite laid with pointed trowel in our nether antiquities? Sweet lips oft conceal the steely poniard poised to tear at tender virtues, while deceitful charmers pipe merciful dirges teasing briny tears from a misplaced childhood. The midwife held the pedigree, the mother has left the building.
From a juxtaposition we might see through this odious and specious creed to find an intractable misconception leading to a breached birth. If we could only see the love upon which we strike the bead, shall we find instead an oblation…forsaken? Perhaps this species might arrange the parts to better gestate more mature, resplendent destinies — laughing Dante left mistaken?
Or, perhaps, we dance again.
If, forsooth, we reach yet further to partake of placid vistas, that reckless man will put aside his quiver. With cadence-mustered never-mores and ne’er do wells, an offish sultan may hold the title to some picturesque province that better suits such rabble clothed in their bold torpor; where doleful creatures screech in twilight, calling to their flagitious brethren. For even they are sure of that needful thing in the depths of remorse and bane. Lacking chivalry, they bewail their plight and lick their sores in vain.
Shall we turn instead, fetch a compass, and point the brow toward some hospitable shire where the story meets a surer fortuity; to court a promise yet fulfilled?
Or, perhaps, we dance again.
Oh! The sordid rhapsodies that rack within my cortex, discordant voices raise a tension as the strings sag ever lower. Those bespoke gardens waft through balmy visions of school yard cronies steeped in Poe and Kipling; they have left a festering marrow that yet yearns for that sweet vermilion of yesteryear. The chalk mark hearts on playground steps remain my veiled affliction.
I raise my staff to trellised florets smirking, by the river wayside, provoking images of sepulchers, in summer sunshine splendor, the sprays forever blind to that sardonic beauty.
I see the roses she demurred beaten senseless on the pickets! Stained with tinctures of their crowns, a forlorn tumulus left wretchedly desecrated in sultry betrayal. The wage of innocence, ever cruel, betray not genteel coquettes! The recompense due abject eidolons of unrequited idyll are oft paid in a most shameful specie of currency.
The mask tossed on the cobbles. The thespian has left the stage…
These vulgar coils conjure dour visions of taut and bitter caitiffs in the dark stillness of evening. Such are prisons forged for the shackled and bespeckled men of dark misprision. It is indeed a reviled thing to bring to lower estimation the dominion of dignities, while sitting fitfully in their own engorged shamefacedness. Indeed, it is but props to live and breathe amongst the carnal, who tarry long but live short, and feign love but hate with vigor!
Oh! such divine despair has arisen to bring to nought the vain desires of men so embittered with lusty appetites; stars of wandering precession forever set upon the course of uncertainty like a sovereign without bloodline. Like a soldier lacking the audacity to face himself in the dim cheval glass of lost potential. Oh! whoa! is this genesis of that peevish aspect set amidst frigid hearts of copious number imbued with such stark proclivities of lost perception!
he hourglass travails upon the void unfolding the rebus of a new day; this majestic orb swinging the next facet into view of mighty celestial portents…
The midday sun streams down upon the hedges, the coins remain casting back their bitter plight. Of innocence infused with passioned, pleading prose! Of judgment left reposed! The blind eye turning cannot refuse the light.
In that stark reflection we find that cynic! That feckless specter proudly indifferent to more affable natures ever our importunate companion. We fail to grasp those tendrils of a deeper empathy, which might articulate a placid actuality, raised up on summer breezes, where we may esteem the wonder of greater serendipities.
Perchance to dream. Perchance to let the tendrils soak beneath that azure sky, where we might finally awaken from our golden slumbers.
Or, shall we dance again...
The St. Vitus.
