Leopold Hook

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The Rose And Crown

Remain calm,
That's sometimes all you can do.
Breathe deep breaths, plunge
Under the sea of cold air,
Making the cold-dark warm;
Just keep breathing.

When I heard the beeping noise.
When I heard the mechanical breathing.
I heard, and stopped, and felt for firmness;
Sought stars wheeling in the firmament.
The hiss on the T.V. The white noise;
I was still seven spheres-out;
I was Saturnine; staring at the fix'd stars.
That is all I ever think I wanted,
Something firm, something I could hold with my hands.

It was at this point, the beginning of the year,
When I realised the shallow myths
Surrounding the future paths,
That I had yet to tread. At this point, I still had fear,
I felt the imagined purpose of my life obscured,
I reeled from the dreaming mirror,
Touching my face, wondering where I'd been,
Wondering who I was. I had been in fog.
All these years, wreathed and wrap't in it,
Like some evaporated cloud; now I could
See part of the path before me.
It was dark still, as the abating patches of fog
Persisted in obscuring the daylight.
I attempted to make sense of what I saw,
To engage the new path clearly; but then,
Like a flash it recoiled, trailing away
Into the undergrowth from whence it came,
leaving me there, alone in the woods.
Leaving me in my memory,
Leaving me in my mind.
Leaving my future-past behind.
I had been blind, I saw briefly,
Now I was blind once more.
Now I felt the despair coil in my guts,
I felt myself decrease, grand visions
Shattered - one and all.
I knew, just as Dante secretly must have known,
That before Paradise, it is Hell that I must be shown.

By now my fear had increased;
Would I ever rise? I wondered,
Will I be crowned in Ivy at the end?
When will it end? And what will that be?
We shall have to wait,
We shall have to see;
Indeed, we shall have to wait and see.

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