poets sleep in graves

/ Angel Sta. Maria (Writer), Kevin Phan (Illustrator)

Blackout Poetry2 min reading time

Digital black and white artwork of a black tombstone. It is mirrored as white underground along with stained liquid seeping into the ground.

poets sleep in graves,
ache, feed on mulch,
dig through
dirt composing, arriving,
art surviving through decaying, through
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely, and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling, buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal. summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death           
    brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines; to time thou grow’st:
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long live. s this, and this gives life to thee.

beauty through such dust, tell me
that if the dinosaurs knew how to write poetry,
they would have done
so
with their ashes,
prehistoric—put aside their story—date their carbon.
this rot, this organic matter. that is
all we yearn for;
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
         My senses, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
 Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
         One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
         But being too happy in thine happiness,—
                That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
                        In some melodious plot
         Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
                Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

we can never lie where poets are buried,
only watch over,
grip tradition as if they would rise
again and shudder, shun
at the thought of modern poetry,
though we wish to be buried inside their bone marrow,
nest in the echoes of their cranium and shiver but
refrain from begging for warmth,    where did the warmth go?
the warmth from the feelings of their words?—they like it cold—
hugging the creaking wood of their casket to say:
    Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying, ember wrought its ghost upon the floor,.
    Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
    From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
            Nameless here for evermore.

Till Seraphs swing their snowy Hats —
And Saints — to windows run —
To see the little Tippler
Leaning against the — Sun!

but

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

if poetry needs to be sacred, holy
revered but always dead,
i will kill their ghosts with         spaces
and blanks and
enjambment, play
with form and sound
like lighght reize throughgh mygh finghertipse, riiip ahwayyy mygh kapsloque qui
kree-eighght myuzik—ownlee 4 thuh eers,
kahcoughfuhny 4 thuh I’s
and let them rest,,,
   let,,,,
         the,,,,,
tired,,,,,, poets,,,,,, sleep in their tired graves

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