Angry wine of Pharaoh's mother
stowed and sealed with dust behind a stone
lust unforgiving for that wine
want it enough to strip a mountains crust
Her tomb wasn't even hidden
they just buried her
some palace Pilate said
"damn her, damn her immortal soul"
On the day you pop the cork
you will slake your thirst
you will stop being self-referential
your mouth will learn to be couth
it will open to spew the seven hundred individual colours of the Nile
and on opening, it will tell the ancients
kneel at my feet
When you scratch a flame
you will hurl fire from your lips
to cool your burning mind
When you are found in the cold
you will spew forth new mythologies
rolling them into logs to burn
All men will not speak well of you
until you are dead
not until they have made your body a fine ash
they will put you in your bottle
pile cold dirt in July
In one hundred years they will remember your funeral wine
PipeSmokingProfessor
2 comments:
whoa. explain. this is over my head.
No prob. I really don't often explain what my poems mean, but this one really is pretty confusing and it used a couple of cool allusions that bear explaining. It's about artistic inspiration. The wine is an intangible quality that great writers have, it is very rare and very valuable, but never appreciated in its time. Not until the writer is dead and buried will it be seen for what it is. The line about men not speaking well of you is from Luke 6:26 and the line about the ancients kneeling at your feet is based on something in a Walt Whitman poem. There's lots more, but I could go on for ages.
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