Eugene B. Redmond:
Consider Loneliness as These Things
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Snally Gaster's African American Phat Library Experience
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You sit snug in my ceiling
Staring at the room
While insects worship you.
But I can hide you in the night
And you body like a corpse
Loses its heat in seconds.
This time however
Resurrection is simple,
Far simpler than the painful
Mathematics of your birth:
Though in your final death
I'll go through the clumsy
Ritual of winding you,
Knowing I could not
Have touched you
in your citadel an hour ago.
Consider
Loneliness as These Things
Consider loneliness a lull,
As some secret space that jails in the mind,
As a circumstantial melody: the blues of
Wretchedness or the blues of joy;
As some totem of penitence or pity or pride,
Sagging from the neck like a lead medallion
Or a dead bird:
Spinning out,
Spinning out wire-threads or hardfeathers of confinement;
As a hypnotist, eye-blind, with psychic sight
And strength to unleash the lances of unexpurgated pain,
Of unquelled thought-quakes, or Watusi-tall dreams.
Consider loneliness as these things.
Consider loneliness as a weaver of want,
As a giver of needs undefined,
As some ancestral repository
For a personal mythic tablet;
As a nerve, nudged overgently --
Or laced with worry;
As a womb, wailing out its
Liquid waifs, its tight lips waiting,
Waiting . . .
As a tyrant, timeless and elastic --
Consider loneliness.