Glosa in Middle Age
Shake some action’s what I need
To let me bust out at full speed
And I’m sure that’s all you need
To make it all right
—Flamin’ Groovies, “Shake Some Action”
To have arrived here, weighed down with fistfuls
of calendar entries, unsuitably
boggle-eyed as if new—
so these are mountains,
there is horror, which is the subway line
where I may lay down my creed
and when will my breath stop
acidulating like this?
Exceed, said 27. In all things exceed.
Shake some action’s what I need.
27 was animated
but has lately been absent.
With them we raved and with them
came. A dervish verve escorted them
always, which now I feel dribbling out
like the cruel juices of the steak I didn’t feed
on, didn’t slaughter, wouldn’t want to but—.
In a dream I asked permission
and 27 agreed
to let me bust out at full speed.
That was a dream. The juices a memorial.
At present, I’m perishing—
but mayhap not right now. You too?
Something immense is unwinding a spool of wire.
You trace it and find, what else:
Death on the end of the strand like a bead.
To have arrived by spoonfuls of undecisions,
to have arrived knowing you only fled.
You drool over a bowl of soup, snorting greed
and I’m sure that’s all you need.
Mayhap not sure. Mayhap
doors swing open even after juicelessness
and soup. They might open onto tigers.
Or a vision of The Real True—
after the shakes yield to a long loosening stare.
Take hold of the knob: You’re bitten or you bite.
If I, yet untoothless, can chew up despair,
I’ll take a good calm look at the dark I’ve been given.
Is that where I’m headed, with my hairband-searchlight
to make it all right?
Source: Poetry (December 2019)