A poet in the garret Saw searing visions of Eternal whelming flame. Feverish, he scrawled & Bawled t the roof - beams, Lacerated his soul, Screamed & ached in ecstasies As the world by him rolled, Chuffing to the thrum of coal, Molded by mortal margins Cast into calamity, fraught With consumption, filth And slime: the lifeblood Beating syphilitic unction, Mystery the dialect Of his deified dead. About his brow flock fires, Quicksilver beacons of Arch - angelic apotheosis: Demiurgic lancets cast To the four winds of bale. He eats ether, devours joy, Derives and distills alchemic Agonies to beaten blazons Of gold profane. His ravings rouse the flop - House, wake the wretched From morphine's chimera. Stirred to anger, they Storm the august attic In dead of night - fright Inflamed, mush - brained With the gutter's dross, Clothed in rags of slag and Avatar from obscene idyll, His alembic furor for Beauty bane to their Hard - won oblivion They gut aim, geld him. Rip up reams of dreams, Despoil his visions with Hands clammily of clay. He weeps blood into mud As argosy transmutes To entropy, trampling feet Treading his ashes, Atoms wrath - tossed to Ignominy embossed On spilt ink & ichor - stain: Death the consummation Of his ken. Above, sunlight sears Moonbeam empyrean, Annihilation rife. The poet dies babbling, Trachea mashed by weal’s Of boot - heel and fist. Lethe his legend And abyss his tryst - A century hence his Pauper's plot by Reverent immortals Unknowingly kissed. No stone to demarcate Bone, no graven grave To admit his name: Yet, Even in erasure writ - The Work is Done. ***