of romantic embodiment

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Through this time it's blurred and absent, Not my own self discovery, but perhaps That of Dead poets' and their ringing thoughts, Passing into me and I have their voices. It is not my romance, but their experience From which I might view that slender Pale boy with such delight. And I was seeing Him transparent and strange, not belonging To this world; but of course, he is but a Fawn in the memory of a distant book. I am stirred but with what they gave me, Their unique vision and meticulous combings Of his fine hair. He, like many, exists only Because he was choked and caught Within the grasp of my mental brush, Twirling in new light but on the palette Of verbal pigment. But I am as much a tool, A mere embodiment as he of the Zemblan Prince. We are both projections of an ancient word; Him through me, and me through them. They are puppeteers of a different kind, And I am tied to a trance of strings and Violent ripples of passions which I cannot understand, Why I write certain phrases from my mind. What quiver and sweat near some usual specie I had already seen; a queer aura I picked up, Or are the ghosts of verse whispering Tender temptations in my head. I have always surveyed the curvatures of a profile face; Turkish beauty or noble grace, Sometimes crazed pharaoh too in his brazen lip. That drop of ecstatic venom in my blood Made them shy away, or maybe my sight, Engorged with fire or Rasputin's light, Seemed too perverse, too penetrating, Too intense, or just alien to those my age. If they only knew the thousand fathomless Meaning behind my obscure scribbling (on the hidden ledge of a lonely desk), The literary obsession that depicts them kings and princes. I am now but a solitary soul Wasted in the blandness of an immaterial broth. And I stray in the past with the ghosts of my idols, Dying with each syllable past.

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