Torment (The Guest) Poem by John Lars Zwerenz

TORMENT (THE GUEST)
I
Cigarette after cigarette,
With Sirens around me and a blond coquette,
What torments arise
After the bleeding of a dreary sunset!
The land and the skies,
Weary of my tepid life
Have left me in an isolated strife
Where there reigns in the dales of my tortured mind
Harpies of a raven, horrid kind.
II
In the corridors mad flames flicker.
Satan's legions in the black bile snicker.
And all my chambers are chilled and barren.
I am haunted by the shadows of my wife,
Who lives in paradise, beyond the stars.
O, my Karen, my lovely Karen,
Why must you touch with your fair, dead fingers
The glimmering bars
Of the fire which lingers
With an ominous glow
In my study, where the cold winds blow
From the frightful gape
Of my half-open window.
Must you move each ghostly, pale-white drape?
For the curtains moan as they flow to and fro,
With languorous wafts of nostalgic rapture.
For they carry on the evening breeze
From without, from the grove of walnut trees,
Your sweet perfume which only I know.
Like a thief it glides about my form to capture
My lonely soul within my parlor; it calls to me,
To resurrect our affinity,
Recalling to my battered psyche
Kisses given in sunny glades.
Why does the moon in purple shades
Defy my reason on nights such as these?
Why must you recall our ecstasies?
III
And the grasses outside swayed with the gales,
Beneath the boughs of sighing trees,
As you filled my head with ancient tales,
Of ethereal love, and tortured seas.