In The Language Of Angels...For The Poor Man In The Nursing Home Poem by John Tansey

In the Language of Angels
To the senile, old man they abused, nightly, in the nursing home


For the last two years that he lived,
Death was kind, to take his mind and leave the child again,

So he would be oblivious to the way he was mistreated.
Through all the indignities, he just smiled, remembering nothing.

This old anomaly of a man who, lived, simply to write,
Had, one day, written the end of his life;

But, later that night, staff entered, pulling him back
From the white light; They child-proofed his room;

Taking his pens, journals and books,
All that gave him life, they took away.

And, from thereafter, served all his meals
With plastic sporks and spill proof cups.

Still, in rapture, he would flail his arms:
A composer, his wand through the air,

Like a light bulb, brightening, just before it blows,
He wrote, frantically, in this way, the last of his works.

A wild, white-haired, bed-ridden Maestro,
And, yet again, he ended with his epitaph.


Epilogue

They say, it was both written and lost on the wind;
That no one could transcribe the ethereal.

But, I say, he wrote in the Language of Angels,
You can read it all,
in the Annals of the Akashic records…

8.3.8
John Tansey
Copyright ©2008 John Thomas Tansey