Lost Postcards From J. Alfred Prufrock Poem by Warren Falcon

What I did on my long summer vacation, do still, my gargoyle self needing to literally become stone, sit on ledges, frighten pigeons and prayers of les miserables wafting from the Cathedral below. Here habitation is free. Views fabulous. Unlike when in my office where I must be vigilant about neighbors beside and below me, I can gargle loudly with rain, drown out the chorales of promise, the sorrow motets, the swollen rounds of Rosary and grief, one bead chipped, belief, breaks the chain entire.

Continually clearing my throat beside the spire, up here all bets are off. The freedom of margins comes at a cost. But I have credit which is never due, and the card no expiration date alluding toward Eternity. Eternity, that delusion, can wait. As an installation myself, an installment plan (such is salvation) makes no sense. Who looks up anyway but children and drunks. Seen from a distance I am considered a quaint sentinel, a signal to 'an archaic authority'. An old heretic of Alchemical bent, Paracelsus, says it straight - 'Let him not be another's who can be his own.' Yet a modern poet echoing another asks: 'How Much Longer Shall I Be Able To Inhabit The Divine' (via Ted Berrigan via John Ashberry) . Content enough, I sit near It, never within, but one may use the idea of such, eternity - go forward or behind, wince at the word - living in the blue rind of sky crumbling onto nether shore where relentless waves tease relentless wind disturbing a lone relentless tern tracing uremic rims of foam.

Shall I call then Eternity a home for shells, a curve in space? disgrace myself yet again with belief, any one, believe that such shores are a where after all, a place to shelter, each wave somewhere by someone or something counted as is every numbered hair counted still? they fall as do waves into crescendos' rainbows should the sun so shine for what is left to comb of shore and hair is a disturbance of fractions, refractions, the forlorn redaction of what is perceived, felt, spilt upon the depilating pate. And so I in human form must wear a hat but let us not go then you and I patiently into all that but when come time proper, a hair fall caught in a shaft of sun light, the endless comb over undone, wind blown upon the ledge and shore, then we shall speak of it sure, and more

now then here then
remembering too the chaffing bloody garters.