"The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."*

I
You probably already know, William,
that it’s pretty much all the same
as when you paced the battlements
and howled to the indifferent stars
"It seems I must bid the Muse go pack!"
, caught in Passion’s cataract –
that torrent of emotive poetic grief.

II
Though politics have changed,
there's still old men in the Senate
who stare but don’t seem to see.
They’re caught in youthful daydreams ---
the girls’ bras’ are too hard to unclasp,
even when employing that agéd charm.
(“But O that I were young again
and held her in my arms!”)
You weren't an exception;
politicians are also subject to the Human Condition.
Perhaps more than a poet,
probably more than a poet.
So I guess you got the double dose, William.
In a split second the State slips,
staggers, and reinvents foreign policies,
only to double-back on itself again and reverse.
I know you remember those you rhymed out in verse:
MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly and Pearse;
their rifles still ring in the recesses
of the Public’s  miasmic mind –
the haze just dissipated over the Irish Sea.
And it's the spring of 2012.
Gore-Booth and Markiewicz are but marrowless bones,
Collins as well.
His still mix in the grave –
They’ve been for ninety years.
Yeah, it's pretty much the same,
Synge’s ******* is still unpopular.
In fact, plays are largely unpopular,
and playwrights work in restaurants
where sweat lingers on their brows
to eventually drip into an already-unfit meal.
It's hard to imagine a play once
brought Dublin to riot;
you couldn't start a riot now if you had
thirty drunken anarchists
with two Molotovs a piece
watch Godwin’s grave get gutted.
Though information is more accessible,
it's an age of information-apathy.
You'd **** a shotgun to your temple
if you saw the state of education today.
I'm afraid, William, it's all the same:
the gyres still run on ---
I fear they're running out of breath.

III
But it’d be imbalanced to leave you here;
at least you split on a Saturday.
Late-January trembles each year,
as the earth did the day you were consumed
in Helen(“who all living hearts has betrayed”)
’s immutable embrace;
your heart alone she could not betray.
And blind Homer who sang her betrayals
has ceased; mouths ran dry the day you died.
You left before your trade imprisoned you;
before the pen enchanted
your remaining years to a page.
You left before you couldn’t:
before the blitzkrieg;
before the world lost ten million more Robert Gregory’s
and you died from exhaustion mid-rhyme on the seventh-stanza of the five-million eight-hundred and fifty-fourth
elegy.
Regardless, it's really all the same.
Even those beggars are still playing twister with their whip.

When all works are done
and my ambition’s gone,
my words just sleepers’ dreams at last;
when all song is dog drool
lying decayed in a pool.
(An image of all that has passed.);
when language fails and speech locks up,
tongue numbed from throat to top,
composite of thin blood,
walk solidly
from tree to dying tree
mixing my breath with the mud.

They come down the road coughing
Up beliefs between cigarette drags
And slight hesitations of who they are to others.
Orange-ish yellow unattractively
Embroiders their chests; they've got their protections,
Their unambiguous vests.
From hazy breakfast drudgery
To night's exhausted rapture,
The play the same stage, the same lines, the same players.
But this is living to them:
Shrugging at the future; believing just because;
Knowing the store still provides overpriced cigarettes.
Their feet rattle on tarry asphalt
As their tools swing away. Patterns
Are in their hearts, their caged, tamed hearts,
Stifling what they want to say.
They built the streets I drive on
As I fight with my nothingness
And I remember they must feel this too,
Just as darkly and definitely as the wheel feels the road.

The white dove has been
symbolic of abstract things.
I ask it to fly
far, put muscle on its wings.
Until recently the dove

atrophied inside
the skull. Now I’ve forced it out,
favoring strong emblems,
images too pure for doubt:
The Ark, the raven, the dove.

The raven flew the globe
but found no carrion worm.
Because of instinct
it was unable to confirm
any paradigm or thought.

Next the dove took flight
and, though it failed at first,
found a concrete
symbol to quench the parched Ark’s thirst:
one lonely olive leaf.

But even olive leaf
allows interpretation.
Each stronger symbol
creates its complication:
the skull, the Ark, leaf and bird.

The semi-salmon hued curtains have begun to pale;
The carpet's trodden down from door to closet;
The books keeping me company are crippling, their spines
Derided.

Shimmers of sunlight bounce off water-stains on the window,
Reminding me of your blonde flash of a head of hair.

And where are you now?
And what myriad hearts have beat beneath you?
And how many lives have been interrupted by that dulcet fury?

The wind outside shakes the shutters, knowing how deep you run through—
And how you're tattooed to—
My very pulse.

I've been walking,
walking through years ago:
in and out of conversations,
lonely declarations,
and things I thought I knew
and sometimes still pretend to know.

Through two fields of
partially formed ideas,
where honesty stains
the **** and grass blade
some lush-but-vague hue,
I saw the innocent childhood
slip and fall into the city.

Up and down an avenue,
where misplaced hated
and embarrassment hide,
I lost sight of the
adolescent mind
between my bewilderment
at unmarked signs.

There I heard my voice
urging friends of some half-truth.
It sounded so unsure
I distrusted myself.
Like gazelle, my little lies
ran, scattering throughout the sky,
then were gone, camouflaged in cloud.

I've been walking,
walking through years ago:
in and out of conversations:
impulsive declarations
of things I thought
and was once believed to know.

Sparse farmlands spread out below
scattered popcornish clouds;
a farmer's harrow;
his sun-baked, callous-caked hands;
two or three farmhands idling.

One hundred thousand rectangles:
property lines
from a 737's window.
West Illinois looks legal
from 30,000 feet.