The Old Man’s Ode To Albania

 

Purposefully restrained, a
mat for his form, an unlit room, resin
patches on white goat beard, the black fruit
aromatized and embalmed and left him still.
Thirty odd
years since supposed death, this prophet and
lump in oriental hovel stayed
alive. Visions scratcht
on rolling dictaphones
                                                                                      activated by soft
speech wheeze but not the hack of his habits lung collapse. Situation as
Idlewilt found it while looking
for a squat.
                                                           Nostradelirious of
a precise perverted eye awake and rattled:

...seen how nations would die, long
gutted of symbols, flags easily burnt
and mottoes from a dead tongue stunk

for all the syphilitic monuments and
cowardly silver starred suckers who
bought a pawn’s cheap plot beside the mekong...

I saw my country as a spoiled
paranoid child, suckled but never weaned:
fallen to mordred, played by mr. nixon,
legend borrowers in brutish posture, not
asking but demanding the world honor its
prejudice and whims. that man from boston,

those bright young men, bent more to starlet
breasts than politics, forgot
who’d I been, thought a senile old beggar sat

outside the rose garden gates, looking
for a scrap off gwenivere’s plate, so I
went to the risen sun, the developing

son---this hemisphere older than adam---hence
the poppy’s dark bosom became my wind, voice....

Lucidity failed;
                                                                                      he sundowned to a noon breath:
pungent hungry smoke
ate him to taciturnity
                                                         as hailstorm Krupa’d copper roof,

earliest October air settled thru the
oak floors, click crisp swish of country pinot noir
mildewing gum lines
bloody like after a hard floss.
By northern lights and immersion of the brilliant chariot
along horizon cotton

cirsoid cumulonimbus now
rosed orange lumps as fire were to
a dough balls center interred.
                                                           ‘Biting through the soft flesh, and
going on to bite off the nose’ was Cheng K’ang Ch’eng.
Serrated these margins
design, bass
& treble clefs read between
the lines. Humpt end, or toward a closing out point,
be it better said.