illumination

Hope, G F Watts, 1888


just once i'd like to see 
the sun at 3 am 
break through my window
light up my sallow face
grace me with music
unlike the fickle moon
with its dysrhythmic phases
but a hot glaring sun
burning up the paper
under my aerial fingers

jasmine blooms through the night
i can still smell its perfume
flooding through the car window
as I drove from florida to california
i never made it: I was stranded
in the texas panhandle
shivering in a pup tent
and when i woke up in the middle
of that barren frozen universe
i turned around and headed home

memories may linger
but our best laid plans
turn to ashes on the earth
poets are made from this
deep dark tenebrous
anxious for illumination
whether in rhyme or reasoning
but it is the loss of hope
that heaviest of burdens
that oft unveils it to them

thrice have i seen the seine
wend through the city of paris
for three months i roamed
midnight alleys and quays
penning poems to goddesses
i spoke in a tongue that brought
vagabonds running
i was drunk with love
but what is sad to me today
is that i could not sustain it

The Funeral of Shelley, Louis Edouard Fournier, 1889