The Monk’s Habit [poem]
My monk’s habit dropped down from
my dessicated, wizened old potential
corpse with some indecent haste.
No wonder! For no longer can I bear
to be a captive in this virgin territory,
lean and starving, hesitantly chaste,
wingless (in a tantric sense), my fecund
fluids being wasted as they languish
uselessly in glandular “disgrace”.
Fortunately, art and wordsome sounds
have largely compensated for this what
I only can call barrenness beneath the
trees which nobly gather in one corner,
around which always should be fertile
blazing morning glory. But for several
years not only have the flowers grown
with smaller petals than should be but
budding there are different kinds of leaves
which never had the soil in which those
fronds then could unfold themselves and
subsequently tell their own erotic story.
Just then, while standing in the station’s
bleak but comfortable lounge, I thought
I heard the whistle of the train I’d missed
those years ago before my garden lost
its lustrous sheen and no more grew its
plants in colour green and no more was I
kissed at midnight so that (in just 1 sense
only) I became a slowly dying dried-up
unregenerating worn-out ice-machine.
Thus, when that whistle blew from out the
train I missed, it stirred my soul and made
me realise my role was no more to be wistful
standing unaccompanied on the platform’s
concrete brokenhearted greyness (do you see?)
Then as I glanced down at my habit of a monk,
I saw that it disintegrated into puffs of smoke
(the place where it belongs). For when such
monkish clothes are burned to powdered ash
[(especially by the universe which starts and ends
all hermitry) {for sometimes that’s what has been
deemed by powers to be best for cleansing souls},
[although that lonely station platform’s quite a
price to pay, for some (if they won’t use the time
to watch and pray) will grow themselves some
calcifying hearts of clay] a signal has been made
that penance has been done, the right to be
conjoined and blended has been won, though
from now on such trysts are on a higher plane
than lived before the blesséd angels came.
.
.
© Alan Morrison, 2016
The Naked Troubadour 