So Long Lives This
Voices chatter in the mind:
Where do they get their ideas?
Sleep cannot quiet them,
but gives them freest rein.
Who designs and animates
the figures whose mouths move
when voices speak in dreams?
Walking through my waking world,
enjoying what I coyly call “consciousness”
voices natter, sneer, mumble,
snarl, cajole—but whose?
Do not say in your patronizing tone
that I ventriloquize them
from the oxymoron,
“unconscious mind.”
Sweeney and Prufrock,
Tiresias and the couple grappling
on that same divan or bed: I know
where they came from.
But death did not silence them.
Prince Hamlet and King Lear,
all their attendant lords,
still strut and fret after centuries,
not in the poet’s mind, but mine.
Why set the voices down
in lines? Can poets only find
peace by letting voices speak
in readers’ minds instead?
Apologies, hypocrite
lecteur,
for humming the song
stuck inside my head,
transferring it to yours.
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