Thursday, August 13, 2009

the professor

The poet A.D. Hope knew love

but love did not know him.

He played the Professors’ part with girls

shared their young bodies

but one by one they left him to despair.

He was invisible to them,

a phallic god , a shrine they briefly worshipped at

a rite of passage where their gift of sex

met their need to genuflect but left him

without the one thing they could not give,

before they moved on to real life –

the love that never came to still his beating heart.

Despair, despair, the loneliness and growing horror

of his predicament corroded his great ideals

and all his classic knowledge gave no hope.

Death came as a release, and all his verse

despite his skills, only underlined his plight

and in the end like all of us, descended into night.

© MM 10.7.2009