Elegy for Oberon

I said goodbye to you on sad gray boat,
stepping away to let it sink.
I can do without
my Magic little pistol, the "Oberon,"
arrogant metal scraps
that bloomed on impact,
plunging to the depths of my body.
Soon you'll be lost for certain,
the curtain closing on the romance of the century,
modern-day Shakespearian poetry.

Still you don't see.
You barely breathe.

Midsummer romance tempts the faint-hearted,
downing their cough syrup shots,
thick and purple,
saying, "Just one more."
The barman toasts the departed.

The district is lit with murky half light and the lies,
street lamps swaying with vamps saying
their names, "Lady Jane" and "Harmony,"
moths like fairies carrying their plight to me.
Titania, their lampost, sighs.

Searching through that forest of iron,
twisted metal trees
set on a stage for me.
I am the cat flitting between them.
I rest atop the tallest,
awaiting my fall,
surveying my audience,
pushing the curtain call.
But I land on my feet after all.
I cannot fight what nature conditioned me to do,
finally adapted to the heat off your breath,
your back--
I bounce back,
all the while chasing the blood of the rat.

Now I know the Magic, the destruction.
You in your eloquent, filligreed corruption.
I know now it was you who built the skyscrapers,
the great metal monsters,
and that greatest metal phallus--
You were the Towel of Babel,
the twisted magician saying,
"You may call me Son of Sam
and I will call you Alice."

I hear the voice,
sparse and horse,
mostly coming during times of celebration,
frequently singing, but to the tune of the heat,
and I get the phantom-limb sensation of my sanity again,
but dose by dose of you,
I'm married to this regimen.

You said crashing is completely natural,
nothing if not gradual,
but I knew.
I said, "The comedown is when the devil comes!"
My chattering teeth are only the echoes of the memories
of your black horizon,
the way it bled over the flat landscape of the industrial towns,
as if I were trapped in the eclipse
of an overlapping dosage,
like kiss over kiss.

But we were warned by the thousand tongues errupting,
that sang in all people of your corrupting.
I won't climb,
not the horse pills you use as a ladder to the sky.
They are not mine this time.

Set in your seven chains,
you sink in your sin,
the air bubbles from your nose are black,
not oxygen,
but noxious and thick,
and as you let them go
it's good to know that I was right all along,
singing my mourning song,
that warbled from the distant blue--
the elegy for Oberon.

The fairies are dying; the babies are crying;
the grandpas' are stiff in their chairs.
You led me to the forest,
you let me drink,
as if there was nothing to fear there.
As if it weren't hanging in the air.
I went fast as I could run--
Midsummer love taken with the dew,
my human feet, always taking too long.

Too still
are the birds!
Too still
are the trees!
The storm is lurking,
disrupting all the seeds I'd sown
into your heart, my arm
--the pin-cushion where I'd always held my thoughts.
I thought you coarse; you proved me wrong
in our sensuous solitude.
Sweet notes--I moaned my mourning song.
Yet whose facade was solid--strong?
My sweet chameleon, I speak of you,
sing, scream, for Oberon.

Your magic won't get you far now,
Blue Lips, My Song.
It dissolves to dirge,
Oberon.

Under the thin white lines of clouds
filtering through my nasal cavity, I cry,
in a soft sweet voice like a lullaby
through a puzzled frown,
"Drown, my dear.
Do it, drown. Drown."
Will you taste the same when you are dead, I wonder,
watching the rat-colored boat going under, going down
down, down.