Cafe Penance

The poet played prose in the cafe
shaded soliloquies panned across walls,
while candles wept waxy tears
suffocating silver stands below them.

Pride swells in his jaded heart
pulling pulmonary strings, detached,
as the words form on his lips
of terrors, horrors, closed minds.

Stark applause dares beat the silence
the room fills with a smokey shroud,
of hallucinating catastrophes, singing, smoking
dancing rings around the single, forlorn tatters of verse.

Dreamy-eyes and hopeless
care-free, care-less, carefully,
waltzing voodoo rings of riots
trough drunken, slurred verse.

After verse, after verse
never-ending childhood consequences,
flooding, rushing, torrential downpour
of cascading, lethargic memories.

Disguising dirty actions
as misplaced reactions,
the ever-innocent, pure, naive
setting childish words in stone.

No, this forlorn, wretched poet
could never step out of line,
in this dark seedy cafe
rotting before their eyes.