When Poets Keep On Getting Older

 by Brett Rutherford

In youth, you were the debauchee of verse.
You loved, and lost, and suffered
     in order to fill those stanzas
with blood and barbed-wire, grieving
     in heart’s battle-fields. 

Who would have thought
     that you would make it to thirty,
     or forty, or half a century?

Now, you must be a hierophant,
     whose wine is tea, whose lust
must settle for the idea of beauty,
     seizing nothing, yet owning all.

Now, others love, and lacking
     the words, they turn to you,
thumbing the pages of your early errors,
     seeking the fatal phrases
to hurl at those who reject them,

or the lines they will pen,
     — ah! unattributed —
in that cryptic last note
the police will puzzle over.

You write where you are driven.
If here and there, some line
sets off the lover, the serial killer,
composer, or manifesto-vendor;
if someone draws or paints
your doomed or winged narrators,

these things are fine. You radiate
your poems into the cosmos.
Fame is the galloping horse
that flees the steady tread
of the Inquisitor. Your lines
in memory are antidote
to the banished texts, books burned
before the faithful's shaking fists.

Footnotes be damned! Let me live on
in a thousand epigraphs!