Last Judgment

for Romeo and Lord Byron and Harold Bloom

It's a shame we don't talk like we used to.
Maybe if I addressed you with the polished diction
of an erudite schoolboy,
balking at my family, cornering my charm,
this poison wouldn't seem so bad,

and the critics might be kinder.
There are no helping hands
for the clumsiness of nature,
preferring chaos to clarity
and cautious arrangements

of particular words with particular sounds,
of art for the sake of something besides itself.
Done and said, all of it,
walking in starry beauty with the eastern sun,
and the light! The light we've all had enough of!

Is such distance to be taken literally,
the Divine Exile bereft of irony?
Phrase in another way (correctly), where you are,
why you are; get back to me before
I write off those days, and some old man says

there's no poetry anymore.