A POLEMICAL DIGRESSION (On regrets and wasted time)

Wasted conscience- without a modicum

Of prevarication lying rotten

In the doldrums of a silent

But maddening caricature.

With the deadening leaves that shed

Twilight upon a field cast aside by

The glowering stars of midnight.

The sight loses itself for want

Of a kindred spirit and the rebel

Inside one wakes as if in an

Aftermath of internal counsel-

In the utter ignonimity

Of its private absurdity.

Nonchalant, - he reigns supreme- that

Sole abdicator of his own happiness;

And he relinquishes every desire

In one pursuit of an ephemeral strangeness.

It was his bold will that led him on,

And on and on he went, until

He came across the sneer of the commonplace

That restored him without any dying trace

Of the spirit of self-discovery that had seized

Him, and often had led him to dire straits.

That was the infernal hegemony of words,

And the paradigm and rhetoric of spoken speech

In the nifty odour of syntactical calisthenics

That had seized him then, and in his vanity

He had sped away like a million dollar merchant

Blindly egging himself on to speak like a talking tree

Rooted in the egos of a linguistic corpus.

The halt came in its trail leading with it

A plentitude of regrets, and of mislaid pathos

Grumbling in that agony of remonstrance

And wounded egos, and indeed that was

The fount of creative freedom that had

Lain dormant, indeed, in the lair

Of that damned individual

Reeking and rotting in self-doubt,

And self-discovery of the form and

Nuances in the rhyme of his own panegyric.