Dublin’s rowdy streets surround me, shops shackle me to my routines, Rome’s old Kyries rape me, England’s imperialist memories break me, America’s black and white fifties families flash ever before my eyes. I find the key, gasping for breath, no more breakdowns or suffocating, flying-driving-running through dirty demonic Dublin pubs, roadlines-shrines-bright green fields yield to desolate dead Skellig Michael and the end of the earth apocalyptic Aran Islands, searching-grasping-finding-…What? Delphic Self? No anything but, knowledge and college already teaching me Joyce’s universality of particularity. Then what? Why go on in the caged rat race? Selfless saintliness led to several nearly successful suicide attempts. So why- balance? Really, back to ancient Aristotle again? No no, this time no balance, no monastic saintliness, no hedonistic selfishness, all of it banished like Baudelaire, ripping apart and reveling in the ravaged earth like Rimbaud, drunk on wine, drunk on water, drunk on poetry, drunk on sodomy, drunk on virtue, drunk on vice, drunk on creating, drunk on destroying.
by Ross Knapp
Ross Knapp is a recent college graduate with degrees in philosophy and literature who’s also an MFA graduate student in creative writing and poetry. He has an experimental literary novel and various poetry publications forthcoming. Originally he was planning on law school or a PHD in philosophy before deciding to pursue poetry and writing as a career. Some of the poets he admires most are Sappho, Virgil, Li Po, Hafiz, Francois Villon, Dante, Keats, Whitman, Akhmatova, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Eliot, Pound, Crane, Millay, Thomas, Sexton, Lowell, Ginsberg, and Plath.
