Renaissance
My first Epiphany, I think
Must have happened, as if by some obscene jest
(far from the first nor near the end of them)
Upon a star-crossed night
And my consequent rebirth
Scattered like softly stirring pages
Loosed from the bindings of
a journal smudged with malted liquors and
-- faint --
-- traces --
of cocaine.
Each bold shriek of "Eureka!" punctuated by
Careful lettering, unlikely yet not quite so
Infrequent
As it might appear.
Sometimes I stumble on the threshold of a subway car
Or sit in a state of tenuous inactivity
And chew the feathered tip of an imagined dime-store pen
Building up to so unseemly a state of fever
As to appear...
...scattered like the softly stirring pages
loosed from the bindings of a journal...
Which I scarcely believe myself to have writ.
Often I do not know myself across the doorjambs
of punctuated births
And yet I crash through delicate rice-paper doors
Without pausing to open them.
They shatter about me and mutter silkily to the ground, smudged with malted liquors and faint traces of cocaine.
And I pause,
In yet another sharply angled couloir
Watching them fall
Before the gloire of my passing.