Death of Don Quixote
He thinks he can in words what he fails to transmit in spirit;
that a passage to the heart can be quickened by the intellect—
or even the lips. He’s stupid and weary; a Don Quixote charging
windmills for love. But all of Spain will fade before he surrenders.
A profusion of contradictions set his hands to work each day;
non-existence and existence, love and liberty, life and death,
kindness and malice, etc. etc. He is like everyone else. And yet,
he would have her believe himself chivalry’s last stand.
His coffee pot, his kitchen, his clothes, his books, his rituals,
his diet, are all modern and mundane. But his morning talk is
always peppered with sorcerous dreams that begin and end
with a chalice and a kiss; romances that happily spill blood.
She should crush him. Give him what he represents. Torture
his soul, draw out all his marrow, claw his breast, stab his back,
and sequester him in nothingness like Morgan did to Merlin.
He should learn that he who lives by the sword falls by it.
Yes: bring death to this unaged, outage, ageless Don Quixote.
How many turn-of-the-century enterprises must fail before we
finally abscond from his mad philanthropies of mind trying
to conceive a heart, and heart trying to conceive a mind?
Drown the babe, set free the man. Call his bluff; slap his face.
Wring his nose and leave him coiled. Spend all his money;
buy a hearse. Give Sancho Panza shovel and tequila to make
space for his master to rest: Laugh as he digs, realizing why.
Falling head over hilt, Don Quixote crushed his heart. His
only wisdom: remaining dumb. He lived for his love, died for
her cause; with lance and horse, he made unreason stand tall.
Life is but a breath and Don used his to go down like a kiss.
Jupiter (God-Father)
I am the gaseous giant moving headlong into lonely space
hundreds of millions of miles away from the light.
My days are short, but my years are long; my shadow
my gravity, my existential paths are quixotically unrivaled.
I am moving through thick ebony nothingness, orbiting
fast away from the many arrows piercing my many hearts;
holding onto a wretchedness I can’t remember or forget.
I am the father up all night to converse with death,
making deals on behalf of those dearer than his own heart.
My arms are great pallbearers swinging from Heaven
to Earth and back again; and my hands are trade-winds
guiding the accelerative metrics of warped, bulging space.
My waist is solvent weight breaking up time, clearing
space of debris; whirling, spreading until I collapse.
My feet are mountains that shift the tectonic grapes
of wrath; they are Romeo and Juliet, a pair of actors
kicking the cosmic dust: Woe on them they dance upon.
Men fear, love, revile, envy, desire, and compete with me;
but I am angry, happy; filled with spacious longing.
Moody, moony, thunderstruck, and ringed with fire,
Ruddy and ready to hide my fear: woman neither
stand to be around or away from me. I am their heretic
passion; their guilty fantasy, their nightmare; their fall:
I am the hand that mocked them, the heart that fed;
I am—was—Godspeed. Wobbling, centering, angling
my ancient course, always further into the unknown,
marking passages not even the sun could fathom.
I was almost a star but became this man instead.
Galen Cunningham is a poet and fiction writer from Colorado. His poetry has previously been published by Literary Yard.
Sparks of Calliope 