ALCHEMY
There is no thing said between the moments
Complete & unshaken whose voice remains
For the sake of determination.
Mind you, this is truth without the lethargic séance
Of years, mind you
That these are the words of
Hypocrites and players, dreamers & fools who would
Assume or consume your heart with their
“Things”
Calculate and transcend the towering dooms of doom
Love & cherish all faces equally at the mere
Mention of sirens or hollow men
For beauty is a butterfly up in a tree or quite possibly
The sound of one devoted heart, not a superman
Nor a super model nor the uncontented cries of
Oversexed rock stars.
Time will do quite fine
Without them when time knows what desire
Beholds between the moments & the distance of
“Years”
CHASING THE WORLD ALONE
Down the narrow stream
Which only time can merely see
It is your life that
Keeps marching on
In days in months in
Moments and in years,
Hour after hour & decade
After decade
Forever
The Remains
But the night, it too forever remains
Ever so quiet
As each new child after child
Enters this cold lonely dark world born screaming
Without a star or savior to save them
And no wise men
To give them precious things or believe
In them at all
As all the church bells downtown
Pause, and then ring throughout the
Cities of man merely to note their place
As you ponder &
As you realize what
The task of being,
Chasing “human” means
And that all is just ashes & glitter
Give or take.
Like the beauty in truth
And the truth in beauty
Which you determine everyday
Fear the consequences just the same
From youth to old age
From the cradle to the grave
Pay, make due and consume
In thy name, by numbers and by the card,
And (of course) by the book
For these bodies are made mere temporal vessels
Of all desires & wants & mortal flesh
Eyes of all wanting and clever minds
Trained to detect a weakness
In all others
To sell the soul
Or to pay the rent
The price, the cost
To live
For all is just ashes & glitter
In the end.
And yet it is the heart,
And its only friend, the passenger
That love is, that love must
Remain as well,
Asleep here in our bones & in these aging shells
That must travel above these fails,
To see through the false lights, gods
And the pillars made of stone and
Realize that alive is not a throne
Or what you have or have not got
Is time.
For everything has a price
That you must be willing
To pay.
A WRITER’S ADVICE
Poetry and cigarettes
Will save your soul,
Or what once
Someone told me
Before I grew old,
And scotch and women?
It’s all the same,
For these four things
Shall keep you quite sane
But now that I’m older
And wiser for wear
I know it’s only love
That keeps our souls here.
For words
Might be wisdom
And words may be true
But love is more
Beautiful and
Far wiser than you
Will ever ever be.
SAINT POEM
In the time of the world’s night, the poet utters the holy~ Heidegger
Broken.
Like the words or like the song
Or like the man or like the poem
His muse, his wife, his dog
And if it ain’t gonna walk
It begs
It crawls
And will eventually die
Alone.
Solitary-slow, old & torn up,
Soul screaming like some bloody
Blood drenched pathetic heart or like
The sonnet that once ached now lost
That once breathed new life into the void
This universe
Still spinning
But dead
Like Gods.
The history of the poem now only
The mere echo and the ghost fuck of
The shell-shocked & the literary damned
All of them
Silent, still secretly whispering
To themselves
In libraries
Over books
Around the world
All of them,
Still wanting the words
All reaching with their new formalist minds
And still secretly dreaming
And waiting for the return of
Sirens to come and save them
A messiah, or
A muse.
And lo, as I walk thru this valley of despair
I still hope that there be some cigarettes
There, or perhaps some literary corpses with
Anything interesting left to say
In all of these
Silent & dead verse days
Repeating and repeating
Again.
For it is not enough
To write or to see, or to believe –
To become this disease or feel it
To become a now love,
A now hope which
No longer breathes with
Too many stars forgotten
Still clinging to it’s lost beauty
And truth.
So Dear Poem
Saint Poem,
I ask you
To please see us through yet another day
And may to thee I pray with the words that
Doth flow like a river, a dream like inspiration
With this lost voice, a generation
Forgotten and left behind
Or like a prophet
Who has lost what
Remains of his soul
And his mind
For in the beginning?
We only know that there was no heaven
Or earth but only the words, the hipsters,
And the rebellion, the beginning of the cool
As the nocturnal music past midnight blared
Of jazz & revolutions that guided its
Disciples in leather jackets
Who only lived & wrote
For you.
As you,
Saint Poem
Saint Muse
Sung the blues alone
In the starry night
Like a transmission
To the damned
And the unaccepted
Lost
But where are you now
Saint Poem, Saint Muse?
Where are you now?
To see, to sing of this humanity
Living in the streets
Living un-alive un-dead,
Scattered & trapped here
In a new century
Without light
Where are you now
Saint Poem?
To tell us that
The human heart
Isn’t dead that the myth
Isn’t dead just yet?
As we
The poets
The prophets
And the every
Day dreamers
Of ordinary
Wait
As we
The workers
The lovers
And all the
False salesmen
Of shit
No one wants
Are still waiting
For the next
Awakened
Breathing time
Of creation
Among all these
Forgotten stars
Lost, in their
Forgotten realms
Still, always returning
Back home again with
The same damn
Fucking song
Drunk & alone
And singing The
Resurrection Waltz
Once more
And again
To themselves.
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Much more on R.M. Engelhardt can be found via his web page by clicking here…