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
