Formaldehyde

By Norman Miller

By Norman Miller

I wallow, the last swallow of too-many springs.
When I was young, I should have traded in my wings,
too tired now to sing the nothings, the daily travails:
shop, family, feuds - futilities, grails.

Now I'm cast out for my sins of mediocrity,
slipping past the lap-dog Cerberus, his dull ferocity
like memory and culture, curling smoke in my eyes,
a Guy Fawkes pyre of all that came to criticise.

Friends say I have too much and too little uncertainty.
Not like them anymore, they would like to ignore me,
expel me quietly from the circle: their souls are bright metal,
words bullets. Dust, like love, begins to settle.

People are snakes in this post-Eden, tightening protective coils.
Singular, I am as strange to them as scooped Martian soils.
They analyze me as if I'd died,
and lay now in formaldehyde,
like a dead planet among young stars and satellites,
flaring in a darkness of a billion bright lights.

I am recalcitrant. The garden goes to pot, free at last.
I'm a fish, in clear water and pain from the hook he cast.
I laugh, a little too loud. I can see the others blanch.
My life moves further on tunnelled tracks, another branch.
There are moments when one becomes almost too scared to fail,
remaking the song with practice trills on a pointless scale.