Promises of Golden Fire

[richgmorgan]

You wrote your book of longing
Took down the songs of mercy
Every style of tenderness
Was in your verse exalted

Go you now to write
The last song of redemption
Before it is too late
To sing its vast refrain

You old bastard, Leonard
You faithlessly transcribed
The sacred rhymes and litanies
Of holy damaged lives
Leaving us to seduce the ones
Whom you long abandoned
At second hand, with only
Your creations at our side

The poems with the raven eyes
And songs that stare from telegraph wires
Lured me into darkness
With promises of golden fire

I'm sorry to hear you lost your mother
And I know you miss your father
To be alone is always very hard
Will you leave us orphaned now
Drowning in laments
And pieties of priests and prison guards

You were right about one thing
They always lock up the wrong men
And we are still at war
With the religious and the carnivore
Chauvinists and feminists
And all who wish to strangle love
Of its final poetry and breath

You were right, I'll give you that
I bring you this, an offering
A poem you never sought
And would never swear a moment by
From a man so cheaply bought
And still enslaved as I.

[shaz]

Amazing and so passionate in its repose.
I can recall listening one day to the "songs of love and hate" 30 times in one day.
My family were going mad, but i wanted to get on track with them, and did.

[carm]

You were right, I'll give you that
I bring you this, an offering
A poem you never sought
And would never swear a moment by
From a man so cheaply bought
And still enslaved as I.

Was it all but a dream, for his passions still enslave him?

A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe