Cripple's Catharsis

The oaks touch
the august, dappled sky
out the master-bedroom windows,
and the sparkling French doors
turn on
the smoothest hinge

in the garden, the snap-dragons curl,
the artichokes frost verdantly, 
and the lilacs dangle abundantly
in a deep, royal purple

but my heart
it beats and blossoms
a darker soul-sick sable,
and years of oppressed misadventure
have left me misshapen and numb
and as wolfish as man-like

the world's stage no longer
concerns me,
seeming but a tangled cluster
of passe pretensions, crass catch-22s,
and garden-variety perversions...

drugged in the twilight hours
I pray for Pluto's passage,
and yet this too solid flesh
neither crumples nor avails
but sags and leans,
yet cane-clasping stands
like week old-bread...

how much better
to be honorably remembered
among the rited dead...
than to with pathos
pass the hours
a monster...
with chess-boards, poems, and prostitutes
sordid and sapped
quite past the vital flame
of one's snapping life