[Newspoetry] Political Phantasms

[DL Emerick]

Fantasies

Evanesce and evaporate

Hoary frost on clear window pane

When sunlight shines again

 

Dreams drift on

Compel illusions to haunt mind

A flimsy negligee you wear

When you want to be almost bare

 

Love lives lies

Bright flames devouring politics

Memories glowing in the dark

Fall into ashes devoid of spark

 

When he was young, Doualpe had visions of a better life, where poverty was not
epidemic, nor war pandemic, where all shared the basics of a good and easy life,
where decency was a demos universal.  Life is not often lived in its entirety as
if one had only the well-being of others as one’s sole concern.  Indeed, Doualpe
was not that kind of saint.  He lived his dreams, defiled as they must be, as
well.  Every assertion of truth he uttered came from a wound, some hurt in him
that cried out to be healed.

 

He followed McCarthy to New Hampshire, in the spring of 1968.  A foolish war
raging on the other side of the world was matched by a foolish flame of love
raging inside him.  He was a virgin, political and physical.  He walked the
streets for both his loves.  He listened to speeches and repeated them, publicly
and privately, wagging his tongue.  He orated and demonstrated; he cavorted and
disported, too.  He ate and slept as well, in the fever of the times.  Perhaps,
the zeal of his outer convictions created a magnetic field of attraction, for
like-minded mates, for he found himself in the play of a competition between
prospective mates, those soul mates desiring to be closer to him than the outer
aims of McCarthy.

 

Such was his naïveté that he soon found himself in a hotel room, after a hard
day of supporting the campaign.  He found himself in a hotel room, but not
alone.  The woman who was to become his mate had danced her charms before him,
dazzling his eyes in their fresh unfamiliarity, permitting his responding
amorous advances, on a bus returning the excited volunteers to their sleeping
places.  They were to split a double-bed room, but she chose to cross the line,
to enter the forbidden zone, wanting to taste the forbidden fruits.  She emerged
from the bathroom, in flimsy negligee and climbed into his bed, snuggling and
foundling, reawakening his political passions in another direction, where he
engaged himself, in abandon exploring foreign territory, taking possession of a
promised land he had not thought to occupy.  Sleep deprived, he awoke, fatigued.
His bedmate awoke as well; they repeated and extended the acts of the previous
night in a room where the light of morrow’s day did not shine.

 

McCarthy won, after another fashion, as well – though, too, finally, his quest
of love was burned out and denied more fuel.  So passes love in this world.  The
most raging fires consume bodies, funeral pyres lighting the way to death’s
door, monks aflame in protest.

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