The Immortal Speaks

 

Blessed be. 

Velumbound. 

Are you carefully scrutinised by undiscovered forces from another realm? 

Do we, in the Great Mists, live forever?

Many of your types I pass daily, but especially at midnight. 

When I sit on the edge of their bed

Have always asked

Even though we're all invisible

We still hear you 

As you struggle to confide in the forbidden silence

Especially in the last dregs of sunlight before dusk

Are we immortal souls? 

You continuously question

What would you do with all our time?

Would it drive you right out of your mind?

Well, here's my answers 

Just for you to read before you turn to dust

In here

This dark place is known to the enlightened few as The Shadow Lands

Where I now exist and drink almond ambrosia to worship and pray alone

Commissioned until eternity to strive to excite lost souls 

To confess their sins as my penance 

As I've been anointed with a chance to find a means to atone

To try to guide sacrificed, deserted souls who stumble and end up my way

Praying to go home through random long or short legions of their exorcisms

In red rivers of linear poetry

Like a drunken

James Brown

I gather them around to listen to what my words truly mean and say

While high on whiskey and singing 

Papa's Got A New Bag. Globally 

Dressed like my prototype

Good old Bob Dylan 

In black

When he once faced his own faithful hurricane

I sometimes entertain them by dancing wildly in a smoke-filled stanza circles

Of 575 with the all-time king of pop

Michael Jackson

Whilst moon-walking in grey skies

Watched by others and the occasional falling star

My agastopia of delicious lines graces their minds

Like a new friend, I was recently introduced to

Hugh Hefner

The one famous for all those damned but hot

Playboy’s pictures

That sent adolescent and immature minds' cerebral cortices 

And libidos are totally insane

I sometimes stand in the half-light 

Telling them

I'm so strong and powerful like that Thandie Newton

The one who once found strength 

Self-worth and power

In a new Westworld 

Whilst being reborn again and again

My words are whispered enchantments, you see

Spells sent to serenade your tired, bored five senses 

Filled with a crescendo of rising fire 

Like when Marlon Brando

Embraced emancipation while causing total carnage.

Death and eventual apocalypse

In Cambodia 

As he boarded that fateful flight 707 from The Seventies 

Dreaming of his girl next door, he left home

Called Sophia 

Am I a sceptic like some say, or just a wide-eyed spectator

A majestic soother like an otherworldly philosopher 

Or just a beguiling collaborator

Can you feel me

You ought to

I am simply giving you a mixture of words

Gracing your insatiable eyes

Through cheap or expensive plastic movie screens

As I hide in the dangerous depths 

Of the twenty-first century's fast-flowing mobile streams

For I'm just a beautiful old beast

A heaven-sent narrator

Steamrolling through with lustrous glossy keys 

To all the so many wet lesser brothels of your mind

As you sit watching and casually sipping these sweet-tasting words as you read

And just like so many

I already know 

You'll soon become gloriously addicted to my cheap bottles of poetic mead 

You see

I'm just a non-living fossil

A mesmerising essence from bygone days 

Mentioned only once in The Great Golden Books of The Byzantine 

I celebrate on Tuesdays and Sundays 

By going knee-deep into humanity's new future

MK Ultraing new intellects forever

To live 

Just to love me

As I program them

Like an expensive computer geek

I'm a mixture of all of life's sweet-tasting aromas and scarred sacred baggage

Can you feel me yet

Am I just behind you

Watching and walking

As you stride out bravely in front

Or am I standing, hiding 

Just beyond sight and keeping firmly closed

All the smoky doorways to all your dreams

Can you feel me like Old Nick

One of my dearest buddies 

An everlasting God 

That guy loves stalking you all like an ageless Marquis

Me

I'm just a once-unvisited world of beguiling words

Just conceived into being by the Elemental unspoken old Gods from mystical Talen

Tasked to slowly just consume your earthly time 

Of three scores and, if you're lucky, ten

Can you feel my bony fingers stroking those secretive rooms 

The ones barely visited when you're awake and drunk 

In this world, many addictive potions

But the ones you always use your golden keys to open and visit

When you dream 

And it's then, and only then

That you'll see me

As I appear before you

Dressed in blue

To stimulate your mind to carefully unwind

All those old, sometimes painful threads 

And through finding your own catharsis 

The freedom to write to be free

It is then and only then

That you'll meet me and also whisper... 

Blessed be... 

(C) 

Copyright John Duffy