Kerry Shawn Keys (USA / Lithuania)

End of Time

Reading The Wine Cup written

by the Muse’s friend and mine,

it seems high time I join him

and the tippler, Tao Yuanming,

in lovely plum orchard or garden,

maybe loopy Blake’s in London,

or Cambridge or a samanė cabin.

Why waste away, shelved with books

and a gimpy walk around the block.

Of late, I know more down than up.

Not “getting down” but lying down,

down and out in down in the dumps, on

a dump like a botched bouquet of a man

in an empty jar on top of a dump.

My poems, like this, mope and mope,

never reaching Jenning’s laments or Lydian trope,

thinking Vesuvius and the end of Times

with a silly hubris that it ends in mine.

So I’m leaving all of this behind, going

back to the beginning of this poem

by hitching a ride to join Berengarten

and Tao Yuanming over a cask of wine

in Eden’s garden, eternally outside time.

Back to introduction here.

Next contribution here.