If You Know What’s Good for You

_{^{© John Towner, Unsplash}}

The season brings a delirium of time
shifty as quicksand, but I’m too far adrift to
fathom it.  It’s just so damned hard to get
into these dreary daily doings, so I’m drunk

on a procrastination of coffee.  I don’t
want to unravel, unanchored, just want to be
a charming plaything, winsome, not martyred
as house elf, one of those unseen slaves

who ensure the spick-span purification of
sparkling quarters, a place that swallows time
with its early phantoms.  Only when asleep I get
to better chase the perfect escape, a drunk

devouring wolf sleep, rogue and sham.  I stay
bed-long into Sunday morning, an earned drunk
aftermath of a night’s unspooling of limbs on
the comfort and cooling of sheets, the taste of wine

iron scent in my hair, my long-abandoned virtue
lost somewhere, a hyena of chores circling my poetry
but for now, I’ll deliquesce, vegetate, do whatever.

^{_{© N Nazir 2023}}

Written for Shay’s Word Garden, where we are given inspiration with a word list from the surreal poetry of Rimbaud.  Words used: season, delirium, charming, plaything, phantoms, asleep, wolf, sham, hyena.

Written also for WWW at the Skeptic’s Kaddish, where the poet of the week (Angela Wilson) challenges us to write a golden shovel poem, a form that entails us to incorporate a line or section of a known poem as the final word in each line (similar to an acrostic).  I’ve never done one before so I was keen to have a go.  I included a section of Baudelaire’s well-known poem Get Drunk.

“…Time to get drunk!
Don’t be martyred slaves of Time,
Get drunk!
Stay drunk!
On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!”

*You can read the full Baudelaire poem here.

*Of course, my poem is not true.  Though such a Saturday night is familiar to me, it’s been a while.  Last night, I had a nice cup of cocoa and was all tucked up in bed at a perfectly reasonable time 🙂