all Horatios here, or "Loi Krathong"

(Thai for "new beginning,"
as in new beginning festival)

“Loy Krathong”

Melancholy’s flame
consumes our leavings
as time consumes
dead branches of our lives

The pine-needles of yester-year
age to stenciled pen-knives
as we reach myopic senility
younger or older
richer or poorer
meeker or bolder

anarchists and orthodontists
all fall into middling life crisis:
frigid admissions of fragility
epiphanies of relative islandization…
“the proud man’s contumely and
the pangs of disprized love”

and we must face them today
as seen through reason
not as fatherly sent from above
but as miserly rented to us…
our hands fitted to the glove
the breadth of our spirits and choices
hackled to pass through
the variable-calculated factory
of insincere pseudo-scientific conversation

yes, better the bomb:
to die with applause and aplomb
than to plaud cattled through another lie-clad
icono-clastic carpeted hall-way
grown waspish with P.H.D. littered ants
twitching their black-souled mandibles
over each other's coffee-cups

yet that mind-bending decision,
that coil-snapping incision
is often best not made at all…
but left to the prophets
as our livs turn to profit:
For, what honor is hemlock
drunk alone?

After all:
who are we kidding?
We're all Horatios here:
geological kiddlings
most luckily kindling
for the next passing star