© 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 🙂
Sunra Rainz 