Dear Muse, sweet girl, where are you
and where is the world? I have no soul,
no personal song, so what matters dignity anymore?
I have heard the Rhetoritician speak pro and con
but there are no more arguments to be made:
flimsy props and pastiche costumes
for mere ghosts in a shadow theatre.
Poor vessels, indeed—no ark big enough for the masses.
The waters should rise and make a sop
of all this solid globe, said Willy Shakemedown;
Keats, whose humble name was writ on water,
knew the color of this life is water,
as Cormac later clarified.
Soyons avare comme la mer,
a greasy catamite living in Paris
once remarked. Damp ghosts indeed!
But the sea somehow reminds us of God,
that ultimate metaphor: Proteus incarnate.
Such wishy-warshy concepts.
Time is water too—did you know that?
Water flowing but never an arrow,
nor a river either but an ocean entire,
shoreless and heaving—nothing to grasp—
only a cold wet darkness, heartless
but alive. Die Wille als Welle;
what Thales named the primary element.
Now little ship, look out!
There ain’t nuthin’ in here but warter.
You understand now? We’re drowning in it as I speak.
Put the future and past together:
what portends but an idle pasture?
Go float in it; soak up the sun;
sink to the bottom of the sea like a stone.
Poetry is that bubble bursting
on the surface, achingly beautiful
in its utter hopelessness.
J S Khan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Burial Magazine, Bruiser Magazine, Farewell Transmission, Michigan City Review of Books, The Bulb Region, and Dodo Eraser.