What is a poet?

he drank and drank and sought oblivion - none came.
there was no euphoria, no altered plane
just a steady numbing
yet he heard it all and saw all - missed nothing,
he was indeed a poet of no mean proportion
a short-lived van gogh of words
bent to self-destruction on his path to knowing.
lips a line drawn thin - no resemblance to a mouth.
lids distort the sound of eye and crepe covers the brittle bones
dry laughter dying, dying pall.  might as well not have been here at all.
times he wonders why we bother.  what’s the draw?
raw pleasure of flesh, the painful parallel of love and hate.
do we want too much to feel or taste anything that we take it up so easily?
do we expect more of it than what it is that we so desperately seek the siren’s call?

© Perle Champion