I crave quiet more than palest sinners
Do their peace of absolution and lift
Toward tolerable circumstance wherein
Green fields flowing beneath warm winds
Play a simple, serene music.

I pray in the gray throng’s heralding din
This drowning siren die away and leave
Faint thhought to famish, feign, or forge beyond
Splitting bone and aching sight in face of
Plain, revolving day’s hissing tread of night.

I lay subtle or naked by degree.
The myth of common speech harbors the vague
Extremity, solidly-stateed airs,
Whims of purchase, the purchases of whim,
All paid with the natio0n’s prismatic mirror.

Then say this man, a spawn of time, should feel
Abrupt and free? Even to imagine
Will-tuned guitars flourishing and dancers
Sweeping across a mosaic of red tile
Inlaid upon the wrecked and shattered ground?

Cement formed volume,
Honed to the shape of a missile,
Spun like stars and stripes of red
In redundant revolution.

Then Orbit composed another turn
Through fluid streams of time,
Those dry and slowly-sorted sheaves,
Darkening pleasures for the Lion.

A dusty labor to be sure
Of moths of brittle fame;
Thus, the rocky mane eroded
And the beast no longer gained.

He went aloft as condors do,
Borne from flickering fire
'Neath the black Atlantian Sea,
Where none should have dared conceive.

Let my reason find its burrow
And sleep there ‘til tomorrow.
For too much thought has made me pale—
My wife did phone to weep and wail.

I admit to pleasant sins I shall not relinquish,
Duty, despair once so difficult to distinguish.
Now at night I sleep, a smile across my lips,
Knowing my ear is well beyond her churlish quips.

Married life can be a nasty business
When to spouses, locked in bitterness,
Endeavor with all their druthers
First to cheapen, then liquidate the other.

Now in this second month of my emancipation
I grow deaf toward such desperation;
Besides, the laugh and wit of my present mistress
Has tendered me free of that frightful mittimus.