Collegia – Ode 65: The Smoke of my Soul

 

Smoke!
I choke,
This is more than a joke,
All the gods I invoke.
Smoke
Pouring out in voluminous masses
Blotting
and clotting
and covering with soot
and smearing the brute
faces that leer distortedly through
the blue
smoke-laden atmosphere
at the circle of asses
dismissed from their classes
and assembled here,
swotting,
or rotting,
or boring,
or snoring
with a resonant hoot
as of some siren blaring forth through the fog that
bords and iron-bound coast,
over the breakers rolling.
along the ceiling pour
billow after billow wafting,
lofting,
veiling the windows with gauze
filling the throat with nause.

And as the grey clouds roll
I see my soul
as a room full of smoke,
fed by the coke
of gassy retorts,
in which the miasma distorts
the simple truth,
and pristine youth
has become prematurely old;
the creeds that I hear
wear a hideous leer
repulsive and cold
in the smoke of my soul,
in the smoke
that eclipses a host
of accepted beliefs that have substance no more
than a ghost
in the smoke of my soul!

12. 3. 29