Poetry Night - Baudelaire

Tonight again is poetry night. My friend read "Wine of the Lonely." I read "Crowds." No painting tonight, as I needed to step away from the canvas.

I have posted my fellow poet's below, and mine follows:

Charlie, Can You Hear Me?

Baudelaire's works all wax tragic
Themes of loss and grief and death
Permeate each page, while magic
Thoughts round out this poet's breadth

Images of dying faces,
Touched by a cadaverous hand
Gamblers, madames, vagabonds stand
In sephulchral urban mazes

Island orgies seen or dreamt of
Cannot soothe a life without love
Or fill the coffers of a once-rich poet

Charles, if you peer down from above
You see that your works are well-thought of
Though in your time, few would dare to show it

(c) hmh, 2007


The Half-Drunk Bourbon

In the grayness of the night, reflected in the blue-grayness of my art, there sits a solitary bourbon glass, and in it, about half the amount of bourbon usually consumed.

On my canvas, I have painted walls and floor and bed, and I have sipped some stout and written notes and sketched and occasionally looked over at the bourbon glass, which sits on the coffee table in front of the armchair, which is where you would be were you here.

I will not finish the bourbon, because what is left belongs to you. I poured religiously, almost unconsciously, the right amount for us to share and sip - drunk almost with the same rhythmic pace that we received our kisses from the dark lady that one warm September night.

But you are not here, and you won't be for a while. And your absence in my cloister, where I paint and where you once wrote, is painful, almost unmeasurable except by what remains in the neat glass of bourbon.

(c) fprm, 11-7-07