VOICES FROM THE FIRE: Merritt Waldon

For Ferlinghetti__3/6/2021

Sitting in beige bar stool higher than the desk

Realizing a long with a great poet that I too

Have not lain with beauty all my life

Although beauty is everything, all of it;

The great mysterious sonata in one fell swoop

Never dying yet lying apart the multiple tones

Of home & security as the hushed bells

Of this dull cathedral clang against dry bones

Ever aching eternities awaken here

Where there’s honeydew

& wine of paradise plenty 

Reverberation of cyclical journeys

& revisited songs of youth

From a top weightless towers the word always

Looks smaller; yet is it not more vast

In its burgeoning

The missing of things year collides

With a great wall of humility

As I repeat the telling of oneself

That beauty is an idea

 & I have often slept alone

In the after midnight concerts of ink

& whispering, huddled in corners

Reciting ever flowing poem

Of beauty sleeping where

She pleases

After karmas grenade, and all has settled

Beauty doesn’t come around like she used to

And I am found whining Counting Crows songs

Trashing my own ego in the slaughtering ink

Of long nights of the dark souls slipping

Into the gut chuck of getting older &

Basically nothing in the grand stream

Of All that flows

Blasted to bits by truth & consequences

Goes to prove, it all comes around

Goes around

Spins like a top 

Or like a dervish twirling to

God sound

I stand looking out my white window out

To west main street, like a broken down

Clown/ trying to defuse the bomb

That’s on the inside

Away from the world

]having a vision of KEats in my situation

Yet we both would do the same

Search out the comfort of drink

And words

Hopefully at the full aid of muses

Dancing in circles, or keeping warm

Laps of the night

Yes, to sip and dream awake

The insatiable appetite 

Of such a pair

Wait. What? Where am I?

Miami…? No I was just in Indiana;

Or was that another time

There’s a map somewhere, I’m sure

In a Grecian urn

Hidden away

In the quiet

Between beauty & Keats, my liver__

Blue velvet coat/jacket

Eyes like black holes with the faintest hit of light

Around the pupils

Tonguing bright stars like oceans

Throughout time

Alas, what pen moves now

Irradiated with spirit

A lantern of blue fire

Across the blue lines

Towards a singular star

See them trembling?

I watch them wrecthing in wet joy midst

One another at the smile of his face

Drunken & lost

Within the whirlpool of vision

Hear the resounding rhythm

Driving the world mad with

Despondent beauty