When Covid-19 hit, the bookstores that carried the hard copy of New Legends zine closed and as you know the whole country slowed down or stopped and certainly changed. The impetus for online posting slowed down for New Legends Zine, too. However, we are still alive and New Legends are important, maybe now more than ever! So today after a long hiatus, I am posting something new here. For you who have read the previous stories and have wondered where I've gone and for all of us!
POET'S STORY
“Once lonely, hard to recover."
"I smell onions and dank wet earth. I can’t think. My hair is too long and my poets shirt too loose.”
“Five years of solitude and no door. A poets words are meant to be heard, not blocked by isolation.”
Tripping on tangled bed sheets he falls. Mouths and eyes appear in the Persian carpet where he lands.
“It’s the moon and nothing more that puts eyes upon these floors, puts words within the patterns woven so long ago.”
Struggling to his feet, he hits the wall where a vision of green meadows appears. He tries walking into the meadow and is slammed to the floor again.
“Ravens and hawks, tic toc.What good is poetry if it turns no locks?”
“Wait! Aha, another door! A poets words never fail, even in this crazy hell.”
Flapping his long poets sleeves he leaps into the air and slams into the wall again. Moths fly from his chest. An infinity of images of himself appear, hanging from clothes hangars, saggy and gray in a cosmic closet.
A skeleton on a riding lawn mower bursts through the vision of the meadow on the wall, cutting down heads that pop up in a plot of green grass that floats in front of the mower. The poets ex-wife is riding naked behind it. She’s laughing and throwing empty gin bottles into the poets room.
“Oh what a wonder! I was married to that once. Now she rides with the cutter of men, laughs and throws gin.”
He runs towards the green meadow, hits the wall, falling backwards into broken gin bottles on the floor.
“Stop these mad illusions. They tangle me and make me fall. But to where? Up somewhere, I hope.”
“Who is it sends them? Is it me? It cannot be, for a kinder night I would if ‘tis me. But what kind? A feathered bird of gin drunk mind? Or another more metallic beast made of amalgams not in my drink?”
“I am but a poor poet! Let me be! This is my part of eternity and words are what I want. Another book. Stop these cruel hallucinations.”
“Free me Muse. You bring walls and false visions of meadows you give me. Why? Have I not bled enough but only sweated?
“Quick, a cooling drink. T’will help me think.” (Steps on gin bottles cutting his feet.)
“Ah, but afterwards a shard of glass as all intoxication passes leaving this fake meadow and a fall.”
“These bedclothes. Let me cut them to bind my feet cut on gin bottles and a poets unwanted and empty words.”
“A little blood is not so bad, yet don’t take all I have. Even a Muse must have a heart of sorts and these illusions must pass. Even a nightmare has it’s limits. Does it not?”
“Why torture me? Is it planets in retrograde? Mercury Gemini twins seeking one to blame one to twain the monstrous visions that make words? It is too much.”
“Are you happy now? Have I proven myself? What Self? I was you in another dream. Tic toc the clock turns backwards. We begin again. Illusions never ending.”
“Next time it is I who will test you, having learned the game. T’was you who taught me that with my life I must experiment. I gave free reign to disdain of the human condition and laughed. But have I proved that poetry can open a door even if the body is broken on the floor?”
“What am I? A moments shiver, not more. Skinned for a moment, then another skin and lots more sin.”
“Is it the moon, that ultra violet pooling in the brain, that sets us back in body of pattern, color, heat, cold, another sun in another bipolar universe? AND POETRY AGAIN?”
“I see a dragon in the sky smoking a cigarette lit upon an altar pyre of light. A sacred thing. And then a duck, quack, quack and a child rushing forward into life in the golden clouds with a quick backward look to see the illusion of the sky turn turquoise for another myth.”
“Paper clouds turn yellow-gold. Words are indelibly writ once and for all, forming droplets of DNA rain that feeds flowers, meadows and the poor species of humans with shit on their tails and their heads in the stars, who suffer or thrill to illusion after illusion.”
“Time is eons, tic toc tic toc. Ravens, crows, eagles and hawks. The return of the bird people again and again, serpents with feathers, or metallic beasts, a cauldron of birth, death and Magick.”
“The Shaman’s fur will come again. Cat fur, dog and human hair. All will be coupled.
“Drums will pound in the human heart and in insect’s wings. Lynx ear hairs will quiver to the mumbled roar of deer eating grass. Automobiles will disappear. Vulgar mask cages will go away. Mushrooms will be food. Leaves will return as plates. A smile will replace a fake handshake.”
“No one will be afraid of death and the words of poets will always open doors.”
The Wine it doth moisten my eyes
The spheres do better see
While it doth dry my mouth
And fatten my tongue
Making it harder to speak.
That which doth make the heart merry
Doth make the tongue thick.
Laugh not at my twisted tongue.
These visions!
How say them even with an untwisted tongue?
The Poet must be moist with wine
Err Hemlock be his bane
And wipe unruly visions from his mind.
Forever.
In wine or brandy there is Joy.
In Hemlock no party
Less it be in Parting.
The Mystery of the temporariness of all things
Is the key to the end of all misery.
Why worry what comes next?
Something will and will also end.
Therein is the true Poets story.
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