(Meerschaum)
Unbecoming it read, the dead poet’s poem, the one found on October 7, 2008, found on the back of a sketch he did, called “Nightmare,” this, once famous horror writer for the magazine “Weird Tales,” friend of George Sterling, Lovecraft, and Jack London, the poem called, “Meerschaum.”
Not an ingenious or even bold poem, for the most part, more prose than poetic (free verse for the most part, with stanza form and a slight rhyme schema), more nightmarish than reality, a poem—quite honestly, by a personage who wished it to be discovered, after his death: and so it was.
After reading it, the discoverer placed it safely in a bank vault, his safe deposit that is, not because it was priceless, no, rather simply because it was the only one of its kind, and a lost poem found, perhaps the last to be brought into being, I presume.
Here was a poem of a man not wanting to escape the depths of hell, but more fascinated with what he saw, when he visited it for a moment in time; and perhaps it wasn’t really Hell he visited but a room above the infamous resort itself, or somewhere near by.
I know for a fact, the reader had first read it, in an ordinary manner, to speak of, and then reread it for its content and imagery, its originality. It had none of his older style to it, nor was even its intensity of imagery, rendering the complexities of those far-off days (thus, the reader proposed it was written prior to his death, hastily perchance); but what it did have was his desire to re-examine the nature and function of his most basic assumption, unequivocally to his second world: that hell was hell, and a home to be (in a way, he was chasing, a longing, if not yearning, and got a glimpse of it, or perhaps he got a glimpse of the more boring, if not better part of that world).
Perhaps the poem was taken while in a trance, or taken from a dream, or else a vision, an illusion will even do, conceivably, a nightmare, one where the walls burned and the cellar was like a furnace, as one might expect from him, but it wasn’t like that, it was that he found himself in private company, this was the foundation of his poem, and perhaps after he wrote it, puff, puff, he was gone, employed by the counsel of Hell itself, or deceived by it, and brought to those so called burning walls and allied furnace, I just mentioned.
But enough of this guessing, I shall now provide the poem (and let me add to this brief, I assume it is his poem, since it was written on the back of his sketch, and faded it was, and I shall bring it to life as I see it, and the sketch is beyond dispute, that he was the artist—and the owner of the sketch—oh well, we shall leave that to posterity to unwind):
Meerschaum
They sleep at a distance of the Master’s bed,
realism made drunk: the great in power, the rightful owner of the dead, the first of the three— personages, Satan.
They sleep at a distance of the Master’s bed,
renegades, henchmen, the attentive dead,
clay tobacco pipe in hand, as if, to keep occupied—as Satan rests!
He, the Ten Winged Beast, inspects, even anticipates—I saw him, and witnessed no
disturbances, nor did I fail to detect it.
Yes, oh yes, Satan does rest!
Written 10-24-2008, inv Huancayo, Peru: inspirited by Clark A. Smith (No: 2507); the story is a fictional story. by dlsiluk©2008
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