Caged Youth

'Twas there, inside that paragon of woods
Where down I lay, within a shaw of ire,
And partook pinches of diurnal snuff
Perpending years past simple joys enough
That, had my senses lulled me not to cully,
I would have stopped the mouth of th'whispering bud
And stretched to death, on funicles of fire,
The necks of those who shout, and those would would.

Rambling dreams of Bertha of the Farm
Whose hands lay russet of the murdered poult.
Her baleful whining of a vaudeville
Of future three score years and ten to kill.
Yet maybe in that coarsely rustic role
Perhaps the gudgeon seeks but to expose
the histrionic man God cast as Colt
Who can't read rhyming reason; only prose.

I chid the Sun a gadabout from Hell,
Constant to the extent it grows stolid.
I chid the Oak the sour age it purports
And shamefaced, pursy elegy it courts.
When crepitation of the rain ascends
to drown the lovesong of once-wrangling Wrens,
I would have chid the ground apart as well,
For being little more than merely solid!

The track that leads here is a travesty
As if 'twere lain as curio at stall.
I walked here as a child, and know it well;
'Tis like a mourning frump, who weeps the knell.
In half-remembered boyhood I roamed free,
But poignant crystal dreams now fade away.
I hear the sibyl of the present call,
"Return, Old Man, dwell not in yesterday"