Barrel Goblin Song

2020-06-09 02.08.26

We’re the barrel boys
We like bourbon joys
We drink till we stink
Don’t think
Swallow and wallow
Come, ye shall follow
To the dregs below
Let it all flow
Till tis all ye know
Whiskey breath
Risk ye death?
For woes, for frets,
Whiskey forgets
Tame or feral
At your peril
Slur a drinking carol
From inside a barrel
Quaff it down
Wash away your frown
(Till ye drown)
Go hobnobbin’
Become a goblin
Soggin’ yer noggin
Who needs a cup
When yer bottom’s up?
Head down in the drink
And no more will ye think
Of better days
Of the future’s haze
Or the present craze
Drink, drink, drink,
Sink, sink, sink,
Dive right on in
Never surface again

Libations (To Keats)

Of libations he poured out overmuch
from heart, from lungs, thus a deathly wine
to slake cruel gods who thirst for such
as from fruit doth vein grow upon its vine.

For Persephone descended the depths
and Autumn came, that season of mists,
while Adonis spoke crimson breaths
a name clutched as blood between hopeless fists.

And so pouring forth, the singsong wine fell
to deepen the redness in the West,
cadences like a nightingale—
the bright star faded and was laid to rest.

Downstream Rosemary

Ophelia! Ophelia! The blooming maiden at rest
with her hands clutching rosemary to her burdened breast,
guided down this babbling brook, both gentle and strong,
with Undine eddies to sooth and usher her along
beyond the whitewater past, awash in the heart
afield of a dead father, lost lover, brother apart.
Let those figures in the rocky froth fight fierce no more
for she knows now the peace which neither nun nor whore
may find in Heaven, nor in Hell, however it please them
while men pull hither and thither, by hair, sleeve and hem.
Whether by method or madness, whichever Man may bring,
this girl lays in a sweet silence, or else she must sing
the songs of Lost Love and the songs of her Sorrow,
down the brook you go! Nevermore rue tomorrow…

Grief

Grief, they say,
is an ocean;
deep and dark and expansive
with briny tears.
But I know
that grief means missing
a defining aspect of
the self
that can never return,
no matter how many rains
are sent with prayers.
Grief is an ocean
without water,
beyond tears—
it is a gigantic hole in the ground,
lifeless, dry, useless with
gritty, fossil-strewn sands.
Grief is a desert
where an ocean once danced with waves
to carry us forward
across the dark chasms
of life.
Now what is left to us
but the stark, scorching gaze
of the sun
as we wither beneath its overbearing truth
and add our skeletons
to this blanched, blinding,
endless
shoreline?