Fanfare for the Common Man

Poetry: 2002 #2

i.

A Verse for Office Gossips

We all should be Tiresias,

blind speakers of the truth,

who know the world through others’ lives

before we give reproof.

ii.

Fanfare for the Common Man

I do not know you as the common man.

I’ve known you once before, and I know

what you keep in your locked desk drawer.

Deep in the becubicled Bastion of Banality

an arcane sanctum bides,

Forbidden Ark, filled to deadly

with glowing souvenirs of the miraculous.

Do you loathe and long to open it?

After hours, compelled, do you will back

the welling of your eyes, relishing the rush,

the crushing high of guilt and rue

that brushes you lightly in place

of my breath against your face?

I do not know you as the common man.

Remember – I’ve seen through you.

Your eyes your lance, my strangling faith

the evil Worm, and the Maid

you loosed from bondage is

the life you have returned to me.

Paladin, though you bear

into your workday contests

ever your rightful Lady’s shining banner,

keep close that blushing pang of shame.

In your night’s sleep press it tightly

against your blood-warm breast,

a swatch of my blue-midnight satin

to bring dark secret victories in my name.

---

Back here in 2024, while transcribing this poem from its journal, I must take pause for the mystical. His spirit has visited me before, and today, as I type the last lines above, I feel a chill as the man I wrote them for answers as the departed often do, via the radio:

Though the wheat fields and the clothes lines
And the junkyards and the highways come between us
And some other woman’s cryin’ to her mother
‘Cause she turned and I was gone
I still might run in silence, tears of joy might stain my face
And the summer sun might burn me ’til I’m blind
But not to where I cannot see you
Walkin’ on the back roads, by the rivers flowing gentle on my mind.

— Glen Campbell

---

Photo by Bogdan Cotos

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