-- The Unknown Poet --

John Herlihy

The unknown poet’s name was Roger Fleet,

The strangest man on earth you will ever meet.

He ran oh so swiftly through the rushing wind,

He wrote oh so furiously, a kind of wunderkind.

Drank thirstily until drunk from magic fountains,

Found solutions amid the foliage of mountains.

Bathed naked in the phosphorescent light of stars,

Collected imaginative symbolic images in mental jars.

He roamed freely where his mind could think;

He often took himself to the horizon, his brink.

He searched deeply to the very end of rainbows,

Uncovering colors on a way that nobody knows.

He roamed life’s garden with restless butterflies;

He found illumination in the night life of fireflies.

He ran thru sunflower fields in the light of the sun;

While others settled in place, he always on the run.

Into the remotest, most abandoned places to descend;

Into avenues of life totally among the lost he will fend.

His footsteps echo off the walls of schools and mosques,

Finding the open sores of life no matter what it costs.

This a place where no tears will ever fall from the eyes,

The other side of the human condition we all despise.

The byways of hell are not lined with cypress trees,

There everyone makes their journey on their knees.

Deserted streets filled with stray dogs on the prowl,

Yellow-eyed cats with stiff tails stalk, wait, then howl.

The abandoned skeletons of buildings now jinn homes,

In airy church courtyards angels sleeping under domes.

The poet murmurs his verses to the living and the dead,

Roger Fleet his name, from the agony and ecstasy he fled.

Past snow-covered cemeteries crowded with lonely ghosts,

Seeking nothing, finding everything, under eerie lampposts.

Yet, out there, in the iconic darkness of deep outer space,

Can anyone find a more alien and lonely infinitude of place?

There in cavernous depths, can anyone be found listening,

Lost in empty desolation with those silent stars glistening?

To places where specters and jinn will never dare to roam,

To where the poet leaves his soul under Heaven’s dome.

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(c) John Herlihy 1 May 2019