The good life,
All comforts laid out free of blame
So you can wallow in self-pity like a king.
It looked so much like everyone was blessed
With your infernal spout, the fault
Lay too deep within the stars of your bones
To be lifted in the glass for observance.
It's a hard thing being seen and known,
To bear the habits and the pride
Of some candescent fire
Sparkling from wire to wire,
To be part of what is always something else,
The oneness a taunt when it gets this close,
When the home the most familiar is remote
As your journey went deeper in the spirit world
And pulled such demons from the brine,
With tongs nearly surgical, that sent entities
Laughing through the creaking floors
Of boisterous bores and whore-eyed slatterns
Full of too much love and kindness
And impossible desires to be unbounded
In the pickling firmament.
In the morning, the glasses were sticky
With martini stones, novelty sex toys
Hung from the lamps. It was too quiet,
The riotous night, was there anything left
The next day but good feeling for another
Just like it, where the stakes would inch ever higher,
Like the seas on a fathom-bound ship.
What shores it will reach mere mortals never tell,
Just shared jokes where you had to be there
Even if you were. I hear your voice, more an oracle
From distant space than a voice itself, yet
No one else edges in. That's the way of the humble,
To be the loudest in the room, to ask for nothing
When it seems the world itself won't satisfy,
Like the attention I am paying is in gold.
