Already the sun slips
,
filches off
at a sneaking speed.
The despot rising
declares a natural
state of emergency.
The pompous papa
prays on the instant
for a sum of leniency.
Alas, mere poet, see?
The sun protracts
your high-pitched misery.
Tonight a summer
full moon calls
a ball of lunacy.
The sun dictates the noon,
casts down dress codes
on the darling horology.
The moon denudes the day.
The night goes without
a blanket of authority.
The Coming of the Toads 
Shear poetry , I say .
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Yes, well, I thought this a decent job of fleecing.
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Strong painting – yours?
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Thanks, Ashen. Yes, but it’s a small section of a larger painting, the sun (or moon?) over a cityscape.
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Vivid colours. Makes me want to take up the brush, which I do rarely.
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I like the clear feel of this, striking, the last lines. Contrasting echo to my lyrical poem – sleepless sun.
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Yes, “you can’t behold the arch of time,” and you “claim the sky,” a sky framed and “fixed in black.” Irony. The dictator allows for no other perspective, and lacks symmetry.
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Dictators – are they the outcome of superego projections? Entwined with the Fall story, that need for punishment Slavoj Zizek talked about.
And isn’t it asymmetry you mean? ‘Cause it’s in moving and changing that truth refreshes.
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And then an explanation. We fell – there must be some explanation for falling. The fall must make some sense, Zizek imputes to the human way of thinking about experience. I think I’ve lost the thread though, something about the sun as dictator who lives alone without symmetry because he can’t sleep. If he sleeps, the night comes on. The night brings the symmetry of the other to light. But I was also thinking of Blake’s sense of symmetry, The Tyger and The Lamb, poems of innocence and experience. Blake compared the Maker to a blacksmith because that’s what he knew, the guy who made things was the smithy (and Joyce talks of the smithy of the soul – he will “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” at the end of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”). And he moved out of Ireland (the fall) to write it.
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Really like the sounds and the conciseness of this poem.
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Thanks, MLC, for reading and commenting.
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