I laugh at my conscious, my Orden - sans la courage -
amidst the unidentified invaders
who appear solely when the moon is down.
It continues to drown, an answer in a broken glass bottle
perished far beneath the depths of a Montevideo harbour.
The elucidated development lies amongst a scuttled arms race
that though draped in nationalistic red, black, and brown,
it remains captured in a brown shirts frown.
Amidst the cobweb grey sink, oxidized and brown like basement soap
remain the essentials, retained;
overgrown by time and discoloured by multiples of breath,
an unknowing experiment that was conducted while I slept,
hypothesized in dreams, and realized in death.
Cousins of Herr Langsdorf avoid these places,
where smoke and mirrors feed our engulfed pride
with falsified lies of morality and freedom.
Stille wenigere Bruder besuchen,
unable to resist the allure of der Fuhrer.
IV
I suppose what I mean (though they will think it all obscene)
is that love can save me, death others, silence you.
They will think their ardent thoughts keen
until the fortunes of home and family
render them devoid of possibility.
And regardless of my changing fashion,
I shall remain dutifully inept, barren of passion.
And eventually down our conjoined road a ways,
(perhaps at emasculating social functions)
I will ponder how my laughable conscious is fairing
(stuck at the cross walk of enviable junctions.)
The youth that leaves home for a permanent lodging,
far inside his mothers dressings.
Oh, oh they will laugh (but I should not care)
and say, 'But he is not worth our time,'
concealed of course behind a veil of rhyme,
that - try as I might - I dare not think I am able to decipher.
When I grow my hair, and walk about the place,
armed with an arrogant face to meet the faces I meet
in a home I miss where no one knows my name.
Yet, perhaps I am to blame.
Do I lie as a lame vagrant in a body capable of productivity?
The only man I can be,
almost, for once, a fool wearing a fool's garb,
almost, for once, a nasty barb (but I should not care.)
V
The voice rises up, perhaps to protest,
and though I do what I do best and make a vain attempt at jest,
an attempt remains just that: all that I am.
And while the lights flicker on and off,
I scramble for a response like a desperate Romanov.
I should finish this, but she knows me too well,
and I cannot help but shrink in this carpeted, literary hell.
I should have been a chord,
strummed out against the paper-weight night.
Has she been speaking? She was out of my sight.
(Though I would never let on.)