More than pretty words, and more than
gentle-calling radically-feathered birds.
Perhaps.
But how better to spend one’s youth
than in the acquisition of memories
veined with sorrow, consumptive with
amoral beauty? The later years
(and there is always that)
can well be passed in blind achievement,
a blue twilight of fiery decimals
and tainted curt initials.
A zone of French bamboo and
bourbon light, an alphabet of
women and the streets they walk,
singly and in pairs, the sometime-
temple prostitutes, cleopatric
and beyond reproach.
One’s skeleton is one’s own business,
the flesh remains the richer text,
promiscuous epic or ascetic rune,
disciplined, worldly, or dying.