A Transcendentalist
Quotidian busyness growled below my bower
where I perched in the crook of a huge willow
that cozily concealed me in its dolorous droop
and muffled the traffic’s erratic swooshing
that easy sleepers compare to the ocean’s
rhythmic hushing. My lofty niche enclosed me
as snugly as the Spartan crate that Thoreau
preached was all the room we need to be alone
in with our love. And, indeed, I did hide out
in my sylvan sanctorum to read the books
that teachers said if overdone could make me
go blind and crazy, the same dire symptoms
as masturbating but without warts. Skipping
baseball practice where my assigned role,
according to the Darwinian order of the times
and the town, was to fumble fungos, throw short,
chase grounders across right field, fan the air
with the unwieldly bat, and cheer my betters
from the sidelines as duties of a good sport loser
necessary for there to be winners, I, instead,
let amniotic swelter ooze my Kiwanis t-shirt
to my skin in place of healthy exercise,
and squirmed in Steppenwolf’s exquisite misery.
Perhaps you, dear readers, reading Ayn Rand
by flashlight under furtive blankets to fool
your moocher parents, were transported
in a gloat of kindred genius with John Galt’s
righteous resentments, but I was your Other,
burning to die like Michael Furey in the full glory
of priapic passions by catching pneumonia
in a storm beneath the window of whatever
delicious girl was being my distant Beatrice.
Thus, in mind-made Nepenthe, surround-
sounded by mantric chanting of unseen cicadas,
whose crescendo rose to ecstatic chatter
only to fade in a dying fall of murmuring mystery,
did I prepare for this winless, wasted life.
where I perched in the crook of a huge willow
that cozily concealed me in its dolorous droop
and muffled the traffic’s erratic swooshing
that easy sleepers compare to the ocean’s
rhythmic hushing. My lofty niche enclosed me
as snugly as the Spartan crate that Thoreau
preached was all the room we need to be alone
in with our love. And, indeed, I did hide out
in my sylvan sanctorum to read the books
that teachers said if overdone could make me
go blind and crazy, the same dire symptoms
as masturbating but without warts. Skipping
baseball practice where my assigned role,
according to the Darwinian order of the times
and the town, was to fumble fungos, throw short,
chase grounders across right field, fan the air
with the unwieldly bat, and cheer my betters
from the sidelines as duties of a good sport loser
necessary for there to be winners, I, instead,
let amniotic swelter ooze my Kiwanis t-shirt
to my skin in place of healthy exercise,
and squirmed in Steppenwolf’s exquisite misery.
Perhaps you, dear readers, reading Ayn Rand
by flashlight under furtive blankets to fool
your moocher parents, were transported
in a gloat of kindred genius with John Galt’s
righteous resentments, but I was your Other,
burning to die like Michael Furey in the full glory
of priapic passions by catching pneumonia
in a storm beneath the window of whatever
delicious girl was being my distant Beatrice.
Thus, in mind-made Nepenthe, surround-
sounded by mantric chanting of unseen cicadas,
whose crescendo rose to ecstatic chatter
only to fade in a dying fall of murmuring mystery,
did I prepare for this winless, wasted life.
