Hapless Bard, I Hear You Poem by Norman F. Santos

These hours of the night beckons
A solemn caveat to remember
How to unfold an empty leaf
And hold the old quill pen
And scribe the cranial iron fence
To unleash the tattered bard
Glacial like his antediluvian harmonica
A partner starving for heat
Amongst the ears of the arsonists
Inside the impending eaves of the dome
Of a frozen and infertile brook
Ensconced upon a motel room
With walls void of sympathy
And latticing chandelier-like cobwebs
Tinkered by the ominous wintry wind
As an old song played in his mazy head
Which it isn’t too pleasant
Especially when the windows
Opens into the sea of concretes;
The devouring sea he averts
For it had once took his life away
Under the streetlights,
It flushed like granite tombs
Swathing the corpses of his ventures
Whilst the mountain passes of the hostelries
Carouse unknowingly
Of a bard cutting his ashen lips
To give his harmonica a sloppy kiss
Betrothed to his music
That the wolves love to gyrate with
Whilst making love in the shadows
That beleaguered his end of the string
And nobody heeds
About his end of the string
For even the elegiac cacophony
Is a euphonious display
Behind the motel room’s persiennes.
His song about the soldier’s wife
Was reduced into a travesty,
His songs about love and despair
Was seduced into the sea
Where it sank with the shipwreck;
He was a victim of the sirens.
Tatterdemalion bard,
You may hide from the city
In an unnumbered hostel room
But your melody would scamper the city streets
Like a mad woman who lost her son
It will run and hunt
And knock on a boudoir
In spite of everything, still be welcomed in
For someone in the city’s parks or alleys
Another soul live in your melody
Though some were masticated by ignorance
They can never find the ghosts
That died inside the euphonious opus
And they will never have you
So you never have to hide
Hapless Bard,
Whisper in the undergrowth once again
For the hungry heart of the city
Needs to sleep in your emaciated hymn.