Alembic

Sometimes I get a great notion
to jump in the river and drown.
-Led Belly

The fish longs for the ocean in which it swims.
-Jelalladin Rumi

Exhibiting an exaggeratedly imbalanced gait
so commonly encountered
in those who’ve suffered a great and recent loss
(or are simply schnockered)
our phlegmatic anti-hero scuffles
along overly romantacized
(and outright slippery) cobbled streets,
muttering mongrel French curses
as a festering fear wobbles upward
from multiply dislocated ankles.

A lupine keening shines
in his moon-mad eyes,
drives the passersby to
children’s games with sidewalk cracks.

The oceanic impulse arrives
with quasi-tidal regularity,
an insistance, a turbulence,
a current of fragmented phrases.

Tortured and tensive
flees he toward the occasional,
sensical stream best explained by
fluid dynamics or the theoretically possible
statistical outliers stumbled on by simian typists.

All unsettled by the erratic energy,
the sediment suspended in his mind’s mouth,
partially repulsed and wholly hypnotized,
he lopes and lurches knight-errantly,
resigned to amateurish alchemical conjurations
and deliriously half-baked hopes
that some any thing from his peasant pen
might tear away an hereditary shame,
coalesce into a honeyed fluency,
drop a delicious, concentrated dollop
beneath his fevered, waggish tongue
and quell the quixotic, sicksweet ache
of soul-sap rising through a lonely gorge.