They who mutter under their breath

Elves!

You who mutter under your breath, you who breath, you who talk, you who tempt, taint and tug.

Show yourselves one time.

Come out from under the tables, from behind the curtains. Get off my shoulders, my knees. Come out! Come out. Out! of my shoes, my pockets, my underwear, my drawers and my cupboards.

Come out of the dark for god's sake.

Naked children, you feotal monsters, will you please for once

let me be

In peace.

For once, please fall into line, one word at a time, grammatically correct, aesthetically pleasing and a little - just a little - human.

Please.

So much for dream seasons

I used to have dream seasons once. They would come suddenly and stay for a few months. They would throw my life out of gear. Shake up my sense of time, induce queer visions, be marked by a complete lack of hunger and sleep, a chronic aversion to human contact.

Now it will happen to me no more. Perhaps because I am not a poet anymore. At least not in the mode I was.

I am, instead, turned into that creature I call the New Aesthete. I have no past. I do not care for the future. What I write is not contemplative now, it is seductive. Sensation over emotion, brevity over infinity.

The image of the thinker is gone, replaced by the face of the 'sneering gargoyle of Paris' - Ugly, mocking, sneering and supremely disinterested.

In a prosaic world, one only does prose. One cannot 'do' poetry. First there was beauty. Then there was the beauty and the beast. There is only the beast now.

I do not wish the dream season anymore. I will not permit it to touch my eye. It is too noble a season to touch me anymore.

But it was good while it lasted.