A Wordless Poem

In summary, this piece stays within the usual parameters of the poet.  His frequent themes of betrayal and alienation play here on the artists own memories of youthful dalliances:  Lust mistaken for love and love mistaken for meaning.  Immediately, one will recognize that the function of the familiar poetic tricks--rhyme, rhythm, assonance and dissonance--play lazily here.  By the time the lyricism has capitvated your attention, the heresy of the meandering song may be frustrating but can be ignored.  Something is said, but it comes out with a trembling, quiet, voice that almost prefers the silence between the words to the chosen words that inhabit the page.  Double meanings and muddled communication make for a messy narrative that nevertheless hides between the lines.  The reader is forced to guess at the intention or perhaps more accurately is forced--by a poetic rhythm that manages to pull the reader knee deep into a kind of linguistic quicksand--to find their own reflection in the words.  This is not an easy piece of work even where the lines appear to be short, direct and simple.  And it may seem at times that these stanzas that contain a more obvious sentiment are present to give the reader a respite in which to unravel the less accessible metaphors that are the real gird and muscle of the poem.  And the voice is masculine like that;  there is nothing florid, nothing sentimental here.  The body that is introduced at the beginning of the poem is reenvisioned variously throughout.  Is this a corpse, a sleeping lover, a stripper, a muscleman, a Musselman (or woman) who's sexuality is obscured beneath the modest clothing that s/he wears.  The presuppositions the reader brings to their first reading are perhaps helpful in engaging the poem.  The satisfaction one receives from the  possessing some secret message may be misguided but the language itself holds enough fascination to be read again and again. The irony there is that clarity is not harvested by these revisitations.  The thick and meaty stew that the poet has created has subtle flavors, nuanced ideas;  but the writer is in the end at odds with his audience.  He obviously sees the obscure beauty of his voice but he will not help the reader.  The cursive loops and calligraphic traces are a long, long illegible rope.  It lays loose and coiled at the bottom of the page, a rope, a snake spitting Noah Webster's venom.  Don't struggle or the frayed rope will only tighten.  As readers, we resign ourselves to the author's pretty but purposeless prose.