E. A. POE by D.C. Quillan Stone, 7 October 2009
Note:
One-hundred-sixty years ago today Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore upon suffering a mysterious illness, further clouded by various accounts regarding his condition and arrival to the city just prior his final days.
"Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully"
E. A. Poe (1809-1849)
What forms, what gods, what dogs whose howls
Echo from fitful scowls, issuing silent tremors
In spine and mind, the kind of angst or cruel humor
Sounding hellish snickers from clefts to chambers
Within a troubled brain in an atomic coma, stained
From tacit rain and feign acid, the brew, such bother
Rather, pen the verse, lace each rhyme with a curse
Once done the rune is spun, ah the latter rung
Harboring in the man the guile and raw survival
The art, wanting aesthetic or logic, is lecherous
While cancerous to thought and passion, wrought
By incongruities and prodigal paradoxes, circular
In locked linear, counter to spatial conjecture
The poetic lecture of warranted considerations
Laborious deliberations and prudent meditations
Espying clarity melded by intensity and consistency
"Heaving her white breast to the balmy air,
Like guilty beauty, chasten’d, and more fair"
E. A. Poe (1809-1849)
Clashing tectonic pride of Self along raw fetches
That stretches throughout mortality’s lithosphere
It is here one hears Solitude weeping, mourning
Bewailing till muted morning with laconic clangor
And din to defend the hot hanker (fuck the swanker
Such the egotistic swollen swagger), and whether
Troubadours haggle the philosophical either/or
More or less in libertine sanctums, yet amidst jesters
There fester agape wounds occulted by jocularities
Staggering, stalking not the cleaved unclad mounds
Heaved in ethereal thin rounds across unctuous lines
His colloquy resigns to her corollary of pined sighs
Into febrile meandering maunders sputtered in foam
"You call it hope, that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire"
E. A. Poe (1809-1849)
(verse one)
To fondle the warmth is to venture the seer, the skin
Scarred and then, the soul returns to an empty urn
And learn the Lecturer’s lesson, lucubrate the lyrics
(chorus)
Assessing kindly kindle to acerbic ash
Attending splenetic ember to exhausted slag
Assaying torrid coal to tempered cinder
(bridge)
Remembering the kinetic annular commotion
Reminiscing the praxeology (the opined human action)
Retaining the gumption, contention, and passion
(verse two)
To desire the seducing liar or stiffening lover, lusting
Her libidinous kiss amid his firm musk and tender mist
The genteel fist undoing in the tryst under eiderdown
"I’d throw me on her throbbing breast,
And pour my spirit out in tears"
E. A. Poe (1809-1849)
Mobbing the satin leaf on cotton piece, presaging
To release timid flesh upon flesh, a moaning mesh
Of khaki stresses and gypsy dresses, to carnal trances
The swelling billow crushing pillow and pride’s ride
Until surges the sudor and sob, offing the bête noire
The beast that lurks and skirts the cerebral rim
Along the lunatic’s fringe singed by zealous ways
Frayed and maimed by sex-beggars’ fingering
Groping in night’s quarantine, dodging serpentines
The raw rescue drawing him to her scented fescue
Coaxing his coxswain hung between sinew and soul
Through the friction to attrition till swooned languor
A placid swell upon breasts and drift mid the urges
"Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness"
E. A. Poe (1809-1849)
Ramble and stumble upon verisimilitudes hidden
Oft eluding, then disclosing, always troubling
To enthusiasts, antagonists, ultraists, and pessimists
Critics gawk, fanatics mock, and politics scoff
All birthed in strife, swaddled in rife, suckling vigor
The man-child, from grave cradle to mausoleum
Pricks and stems gripped, for pain nullifies death
Till consummating in solitude divined in loneliness
Fitly a cleric’s tower, lover’s ledge, and poet’s cafe
