Poetry

IT WOULD NOT DO

by Walter Boswell
12/08/18
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It Would Not Do (prophecy return)

It would not do to ever cordon someone,

                packaged carelessly along like the raw meat that I am;

                                to ever again speak tenets or gainsay precepts –

                no wiser now for ever tolling the truth than telling a friend.

                                                                I am emptied.

                                                                I am drained.

                I am poured out on the ground like once-living water,

                                                muddied and with a ruddy taint.

It would not do to ever love someone

                from the borrowed pages of romance novels and

                                forbidden adventure literature –

                untouched and unconsummated, intimate with the afraid.

                You who are now in danger of a thought,

                                of becoming a carrier of insidious disease,

                                of dredging oneness from the trinity of a divisible God:

                “stranger the acquaintance, the better the personal relations”.

It would not do to vet or screen          finally

                what has always infested me – this poison passing

                from limb to limb, tenderizing with colors of contusion,

                                staining venous blue underneath the flesh;

                becoming supplier of servant soul

                                all           for the refreshment

                                of a bloated and bloodthirsty Master.

It would not do, without sanctity of overcoat,

                to be somewhere any colder than already exists,

                                to mark the passages of my late leaving

                                with the dried breadcrumbs of my solidified tears –

                hide the trails in manifest of inevitable hurt

                                pending the uninvited status of my failed homecoming.

It would not do to make harbor now

                at body’s swabbing and logic’s reversal,

                strapped firmly to the masthead in solemn outlook

                                arriving around about

                                     apromisedland.

Frustration

In liquid labor

                and summer wool

                until skin burns with mental oxidation.

Little caring, secondarily,

                from He who should

                but will not exude

                a single glint of hope;

withholding everyone’s due      public concern

merely for one man’s private        welfare gap.

Revealed

As now

the spotter of contradictions

                has himself become a contradiction –

                                breathing without living,

                                earning without working,

                                knowing without thinking.

                Who’s left to consult,

resisting the worst of all possible lies

in apposition of apoplexy to apocalypse?

As soon

the strangeness which sustains me

                seeks eagerly to hold

                fire and water – one –

                in the palm of my hand.

Ways

                Your ways are not equal.

                                Dare I say the Lord judges me unfairly?

Shall the fair-complexioned embody the fair ideal?

                                                Quite stomach!

                which mourns life twelve years an hungred …

                                and continue to invest moist papyrus.

Dr. Walter Boswell

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