Haunted by My Past Updated!

Sometime ago, Dr. Omed asked folk to offer things to include in the "Dromedary Syndicate" section of his tent show. This was primarily by back channel e-mail, if memory serves. Anyway, since Dr. Omed has for some time been my unofficial archivist (believe me, folks, he volunteered for the job), I gave him carte blanche authorization to publish one of my works from said archive.

And so it is this bar napkin appears on Dr. Omed's blog. It seems fragmentary (and probably inebriated).

Just so I can be fully confronted by this aspect of my 1979 self, here is the text of said napkin:

A door just opened on the street
So in I climbed
A master of the midnight ritual.
Seeking a clearer center
I met there a question
With a beer-soaked beard
We went further
He was my Dante
To my Virgil
(the Roles being, as is traditional,
reversed)
We worshipped a tree
which once was Daphne.   And so on....  
Because — the only thing in which I believe is Poetry.   God being dead, this is all which is left.   Poetry was there before the garden.   Man was poetry.   Woman was poetry.   Before my birth, I was Poetry.   Even when it was “the winter of our dis-content”, it was Poetry.
So Poetry was is all.
Pal.
Poetry is God.
Poetry is alive, Poetry is afoot.
Poetry is God.
Poetry will live forever.
So God isn't really dead.
God is Poetry.
Poetry is God!
If you've heard [this] before, you can dream . . . .

What strikes me in reading (and typing) this, is that even as I am denying the existence of god, I suggest a new candidate for the position.

It's no surprise to me that I cop from St. Leonard — the "poetry is alive" section should remind fans of the "God is alive" section from Beautiful Losers. It's interesting that I purposely misquote Shakespeare's "Richard III." I also suspect the bit about poetry being around from the time of the garden was influenced by the prophet William Blake.

Trust me folks, I have tried to deny the divine. I've tried claiming there is no god, just as my faithful atheist friend has done. But god just kept creeping back into my poetry, will-I or no. I have good intentions of detailing my faith journey sometime in the near future, but suffice it to say that I finally said "To heck with it" and returned to the "faith of my fathers". This digest version is what Dr. Omed might refer to as the "cartoon version", so understand that it does the journey little justice.

I do see a parallel, at the moment, with our friend Jonah. For him too, there came a moment he said "To heck with it" and followed the leading of the inner divine.