Cassandra Voices

Tag: Ernest Hilbert Cassandra Voices

  • Poem: Chimera Times

    Chimera Times

    You’ve lived beyond your relevance—
    Another song, another age,
    Another line while in a trance,
    Routine by prompt, an empty stage.
    The art lives past the life, and all
    They want is what you did when young,
    The bright first thing, the curtain call,
    When fireworks flew and bells were rung.
    Yet still the audience appears.
    The props are now collectible,
    But all creation’s in arrears,
    And art is imperfectible.
    A shiver slices to your core.
    Your fans will get the eulogy
    Before you end the trilogy
    You started many years before:
    A snowball with a granite shard,
    The encore to an emptied hall,
    The dance all done, the classics played.
    Back then it was not so hard
    To be the major act, enthrall
    Your fans, at least the ones who stayed.
    A fad will rise, a bubble pop
    With the slightest touch. The greatest hits
    Came out before you called it quits,
    And “timeless love” was set to stop.
    You won the day but lost the war,
    Remembered as the one who did
    That thing, you know, the thing he did,
    The thing he does for one more tour,
    The thing he did, the thing he did before.


    Feature Image: The Chimera, by Louis Jean Desprez, 1777-1784. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  • Poem: The First of February

    The First of February

    Well, here’s a pile of puke on a bank of snow,
    Yoga-pants-purple, budget-cocktail-blue,
    Lava lurid as a toy volcano,
    Day-glo confetti frozen stiff as glue.

    The fire hydrant’s calked in hardened gum.
    A Phillies Blunt’s in a bottle of Pepsi
    Inside a purple Shark Week Slurpee,
    And it looks like someone pissed all over them.

    A ghost-ship umbrella is partway jammed
    In the snow heap’s side; its tattered black sail
    Of nylon flutters; a stroller is crammed
    Into a dumpster nearby. I’m stuck, a snail

    Inside a crusted, slowly draining tank.
    The chill in me is deeper than I’d like,
    My pockets packed with lint, the blue snowbank,
    Spiked with pink spokes of a Barbie bike.

    Lingerie spills from a cast-off backpack.
    The neon tubes are dismal, dark at dawn:
    DRAFT BEER now drab, the BAR sign simply black,
    Latimer Deli’s knife-steel grate still down.

    The stained-glass windows of McGlinchey’s Bar
    Are dead. The only thing that holds a light
    That’s real is melting snow, the run of bright
    Rills altering to echoes in the sewer.


    Feature Image: Daniele Idini