William Bibby

   SAD CAPTAIN



I am Undone by Thom Gunn
My Sad Captain
Jettisoning mild for rough

An otherwise of someone
Clues to the riddle
Of personality I suppose

Quotidian to self-immolation
His face portrays everything
Between a Cambridge Scholars education

And a robust rebellious knowledge
Calamity riding with a swagger sword
On his hip (his mother’s sentence)

Drawing on a gas flute
That rendered her mute
Setting everyone up like targets

Drawn and flaying at the discord
Wedged open by her suicide
Nailed by every God to every tree

Affording himself Olympian guides
Herbert     Fulke Greville    Donne
To reveal life within death

The coroner’s report of heroin and meth
In his eyes whose eyes recorded theft
Watching the parade of AIDS

He wrote describing what to want
With sex repeated written twice
But written in a different font

I wing his verse like arab glyphs
His consummation lumberjacked
Hunked in shirts and grins

I think a perfect simulation
Of how humans gloriously accord
With perfectly glorious human sins