shiver time is never fun,
you feel the world inside you spun.
there, terror is the oligarch of one;
lost, alone, is not so fun.
sweating time’s the crime beyond;
the stink of hell, the smell of vice.
abuser users are not nice;
sweating fear is never nice.
longing over what has never been,
i must be longing for a melody —
since, dumb reality rejects dumb dreams —
and, brahms is total cake and cream.
but, thinking of him, wondering… suicidal mysteries,
the things in mind, mind’s manic seed —
a paper box of fantasy of want and need:
romantic longing just ain’t what it seems.
poetryandpoet 
that image deserves a better poem than this ditty. i don’t know whose work it is, but the neg-darks and lens vignetting make it seem from at least the twenties or thirties? you’d think it some dada or surrealist, but it might be earlier, a kind of photo image d’epinal, a cautionary? beautiful printing.
dorothy parker would have left out ‘want and’, but i wanted the longer brahmsian line to (over?) work the vapid romance.
second rate. i wrote this inside a bad asthma attack. lack of oxygen?