Poem/Wine & Wildness

The following poem is all Nick Harkaway’s fault.

wine & wildness

Poets are creatures of wine & wildness,
rose-wounded, briar marked by their
insatiable insensate longings: let them
go forth & craftily beggar the branches

of Idun’s gold tree; let them ferment
the apples of youth & drown in nepenthe,
crossing the Styx with four cold coins
for a return journey. Moon-touched

let them howl at the atoms of sky
and the jaws of surf; let them be wrecks,
mahogany bones jutting skywards
through a billion billion grains of desert

sand; & while they have strength, let them
bear that rage, that terrible sharp love
from which we shrink, until it silences
their music, blood, hands