by phillipw | Dec 6, 2021 | AL, AR, GL, HA, IN, QU, WI
Magnanimity: Mourning Gladstone Finally Offers a Peerage to Tennyson and Finally the Mourning Poet Accepts It Arthur Henry Hallam William Ewart Gladstone Alfred, Lord Tennyson Forget the jealousy between two men in love. Forget what beardless envies that in youth...
by phillipw | Dec 30, 2019 | AL, AL, ME, MI
Mists Does mist mean something in the mind? Besides The coming of dementia with its fog Of numb remembrance, Alzheimer’s knife slides Right through the brain. Schizophrenia’s Gog And Magog thrust an Armageddon in The very citadel of logic. Does...
by phillipw | Nov 15, 2019 | AL
Imperfection as Perfection The eyes are white and wide. They look as spare As Orpheus’s when he lost his wife. Yet Alexander never knew such bare And sand-dune meaninglessness in his life. Perhaps the perfect oval of his face Veiled slightly by the waves of...
by phillipw | Oct 18, 2019 | AL
Religion Meets the Nagasaki Force of Profiled Nostrils How feebly glacier strengths of faith resist The megatons of fire released by you, Your hair. Christ evanesces in a mist Of sweat and hankering. The ice, so blue Before I saw you, is transparent now. No, not...
by phillipw | Oct 17, 2019 | AL, SW
Plutarch on the Perfume of Alexander’s Skin “Aristoxenus in his Memoirs tells us that a most agreeable odour exhaled from his skin, and that his breath and body all over was so fragrant as to perfume the clothes which he wore next him” ...
by phillipw | Oct 13, 2019 | AL
Thucydides: “Because of the Human Thing” We forecast both the worst and best because Of the human thing settled in the crux. Set there like some sapphire to master laws This thing assures the rigid rule of flux Or many faceted uncertainty. This gemstone...
by phillipw | Aug 12, 2019 | AD, AL, DR
Outside the British Museum Of course I cannot speak. I’m crammed with drugs And all the shit that comes with them. I’ve turned Intelligence to stupid drawl. The dugs Of chemical addiction leave my burned Synapses tottering. They’re like a man...
by phillipw | Jul 5, 2019 | AL
Alexander He had the countenance and features of Great gods. Believing this, men fashioned for Him attributes humanity must love: Invincibility shot through with more Than imperfection—sadness from desire, The will to triumph at the greatest cost,...