They called the poet a fool for running to Italy

on the day he broke a thousand hearts,

yet even as the last maiden cried out in a mournful

repose and beat her now discarded breasts,

her long fingernails

biting deep down under that velvet, ivory white skin

and drawing blood that eventually found its way

to the oblivion of the dusty floor, licked clean by mites

and the might not haves running through her brain,

the fool, the poet and the madman all

became as one.

 

“Better the fool than the boy struck dumb by beauty”,

he whispered in long cold nights over a flagon of warm

and insipid ale,

the ideal way of making such a hearty drink

never making its way past the ports of Dover and the Hoe

of Plymouth’s fury.

The swatting of the fly that dared land on his forehead,

the pulse of the thin membrane that shielded his thoughts

from the outside world and in which was showing

all the first signs of the English Disease, all combined

to make sure that the features

in his once noble face

was as sullen and ash swollen as a pig with its neck caught

in the fabric of a sty.

 

“I will not return to England”, he cried out loud

or at least he thought he did, for what came out

of his rapidly expanding tongue

was a series of grunts and sniffles,

the talk of the mad man that he had become,

for all poets it seems must tempt that fate,

for even the poet’s acolytes crush their sanity

on the beaches of the misbegotten and the damned.

 

The last action of half beast like warrior

was to scratch his head and to see the blood ooze

from where the fingernails dug in and tore at his flesh,

for the witch like fury of the last maiden

besmirched in his good cause, his godly quest

had taken revenge, she bled so he would too,

they both lost a life there in that tavern in Venice square

but she would live on, cocooned in sorrow,

whilst he lay dying in his own public humiliation.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015