The Poet's Curse
By Oscar S. Cisneros [ Download in MP3 ]
The curse of the poet is to fall in love. When I wander through the world in silence, my mind thrums with thoughts and images. Ten thousand details prick my soul and I see, in perfect stillness, one beauty after another. The capricious style of a sexy young thing shatters me. I am made dumbstruck by a woman in a suit and turned giddy by a girl with painted toenails. Suddenly, I swoon. My mind drifts on an endless ocean of feelings trapped in a glass and I want to love and love and love. But the yolk of social constraint bars me from more than a glance. I suffocate in a straightjacket one-size too small.
When passion reels how can one speak? All things blur before a beauty-infected mind. I try to form words. I try to tell people of blank pages plowed by poets into neat rows of diamonds - a world where marionettes mock their manipulators with scissors and make harp strings from their bounds.
Did I speak? I search my hands for calluses creased by plowing rows of paper but see only ink stains from a pen.
I meet a friend and play the fool to mask the madness from my curse. I hope to derail with cryptic words, I hope they'll think me crazed and ignore me, anything but expose the cauldron churning beneath. In my bottle-rocket fantasies, short-lived fates shared with many women, sunlight warms courtyards of bronze roses. Grassy paths lead to lakes, lakes whose tepid waters conceal a lurid dreamer lying dormant in the mud. All the halls are checkered, black and white. They extend forever and in this place I feel safe - safe to share and to touch, to love and be loved... All this in a glance at a pretty girl on the street.
Then I am spent. Washed up on the beach after a storm of my own making. Tired, drifting. I move through a world absent of diamonds, wishing for a creation-myth to call my own - wishing for a cure to the poet's curse.
