Perle Champion

the night had grown old and morning
crept across the lawn – tender tiptoes on wet grass
breezes teased dew from trees- woke slumbering flowers in their beds,
and me, as the cobwebs of dream
clear to greet her coming
no desire to go from outside to
inside – no desire for the musty odor
of things in need of dusting and
things that occupy space and give
little in rent when
outside, out here, it’s all connected.

she drank and drank and sought oblivion – none came.

there was no euphoria, no altered plane

just a steady numbing

yet she heard it all and saw all – missed nothing,

he was indeed a poet of no mean proportion

a short-lived van gogh of words

bent to self-destruction on her path to knowing.

lips a line drawn thin – no resemblance to a mouth. 

lids distort the sound of eye and crepe covers the brittle bones

dry laughter dying, dying pall.  might as well not have been here at all. 

times she wonders why we bother.  what’s the draw?

raw pleasure of flesh, the painful parallel of love and hate.

do we want too much to feel or taste anything that we take it up so easily?

do we expect more of it than what it is that we so desperately seek the siren’s call?