Abandoned by our party in the garden park of Avon, I feel you shaken with a queasy stiffness; brackish as our garbaged New Jersey beach 5 something's rising, radiant-spiked, rising, rising, to burst as light... Rocketing up from your ulcer's pit I ask myself, what is it, what is it? O how often have your hysterical, profound 10 distemperate electricities hit ground! Spliced fire shams and sparks the matchstick held between us in the dark. Now undone by age, the spooky, loved hegemony of our plush masonic torch 15 putters into mush in the gutted mud of the here and now, fading vivant, untouched. Still here after thirty remorseless years and too weak to laugh ourselves to tears, we lean like water against the sand: 20 No world will hate what we cannot stand. Still posting for our finished race we stand outlined, awaiting grace that creeps against the boardwalk and seethes between the planks that cut our feet. 25 Once, aching with a haltered wish to win and chalked white by spindly dawn we cantered to our easy beginnings and scoffed Bruno Latini on the loser's green. Remember winning? Scarred by crusts 30 we cannot forget, that cannot forget us. Once, swelled by dreams, we labored down the awkward, parnassian slope, and stumbled crown over crown when we attempted Ararat... Religion had us stoned, overloading 35 our middleaging ballast, filled with stones; they sat soldierly, round, white, yellow, white, alone. Look at what our childish urgent hands have crushed! 40 An Atlantis lays buried between us. When the fatal plane zeroes on my heart, faint Fay Ray with cactus drink in hand, unerring in the air, amazed, alert, will you, love, move where I hurt, 45 or like the gruesome Gorgon sprouting hooks spit useless fire still, caught in the traffic's brawl? Conspicuous the loss of consciousness.... rehabilitation the final joke of our crowd. Concentrating on the unmediated throb 50 I think of you, myself, eyeing the prop.
From the collection "XXX Sonnets"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.