January: Year-day 28

         
                                         
                                        
January: Year-day 28

Don't question the insanities of writers
thoughtlessly.  You may plummet, clutching spaces;
from the claws of words you may dangle.  These lighters
of the caves of our ignorance turn faces--
in their inkings that ooze and build--to charm/
worlds/ in the air.  Let them also charm yours.
Then castigate these shamans courting harm.
Without them you could never win your wars.

Poor self-poisoned Chatterton, genius thief,
and Mayakovsky, slit by politics,
and haunting, humorous Poe, worn and guttered,
and Plath, who ovened/ her head out of grief,
and Hemingway, letting a bullet fix:
these--muft, & all--through truths/ beautifully uttered.

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