Malaise

A free verse poem by Edward Moore ©2013

“…flesh without intellect, repellent to the eye, nose and imagination.”

~ H. P. Lovecraft

Intellectually inferior people make me sick to my stomach.

Those with no love for animal life make me sick.

I am sickened by the raw discourse of stunted minds, the lame clamoring of lost souls for whom religion is a claim …

I am sickened by the style of life that reduces all affirmative emotions to the status of breeding signals.

Too sick to do anything about it, I am sickened by the timelessness of stupidity, the universal appeal of the idiot.

Dostoevsky knew the formula: the lover of life so disgruntled and heartsick that he comes to hate the raison d’etre that has animated him for so long.

Whitman had a sense of the end of things.

“There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

Indeed, the end is already here, and always has been.

Life lingers in dark corners, bare rooms, minds plagued by self-doubt, recumbent illusions, dreams of perfection tainted by brown liquid …

Life persists in minds drawn to the past, where illustrious figures stomp across silent fields, dreams of childhood, when a wizard was possible …

Life persists in a little studio in Philadelphia, where an Arethusa flows her liquefied body across a hardwood floor strewn with cans, wires, and Sathanas-knows-what …

Life persists in a café on South Street, where memories of my wife scrape like the overgrown nails of some demonic baby …

Life persists in New York City, on a pissy bench where my last drop of brandy has found a home in my khakis.

Life persists in a park in New Jersey, a dead phone and someone handing me a beer.

Life persists in a bedroom by the shore, some repentant drudge asking me how I like my eggs …

Life is a clan of basking lizards who have forgotten that Brazil is not such a bad place to be, right now …

A savior is something of which I’ve written: a hand to draw forth the pus of a wound too deep for tears.

A savior like Seth, who is alien – HETEROS -and uniquely qualified to draw our minds to the place where they really need to be, beyond the sun ...

The noetic sun beyond the sun beyond the sun ...

Neoplatonic life purges this realm of its raw idealism.

Existential malaise gives me to stay, to drink, to love, to stand alone, to promise others, to pray to a god in whom I do not believe, to read Ayn Rand, to vomit over Bukowski, to steal a glimpse at the sweet showers of April, to answer the phone, to regurgitate post-modern formulae, to pretend to care about some bitch and her kid, to give a dollar to a bum, to eat pizza at noon, to stay sober in spite of myself, to ask for a loan, to pay it back, to stand up to a big dude (who could easily kick my ass) just to impress a chick (and to actually escape), to satisfy her, to satisfy myself, to remember just how the Vorspiel to Das Rheingold moves my heart, to illuminate some dark passageway for a friend (speaking of Dante), to silently await my own savior in the form of … in the form of … in the form of …

Hue, April Formosa, veni! Vocat aestus in umbram …

Giant palms shading our eyes, our hands tickling playfully …

Such a paradise is a dream, only.

Flesh should be the receptacle of Beauty, not of Intellect …

Mind is too vast to require a partner.