C.E. Chaffin

For Example

I don't recommend geniuses as role models:

Coleridge the laudanum king,

Sylvia born too late for Auschwitz,

Roethke a manic ballerina in a bear's body,

Hart Crane reciting to the cod,

Hemingway sucking on a hollow steel cigar,

Ginsberg hysterical naked procuring boys

and Pound blaming it all on the Jews.

Emily died a virgin without taking orders.

Sexton, the housewife's Jesus, impatient

with crucifixion, took pills-- and I don't

mean to discount the drunkenness

of Berryman, Bukowski, or Dylan Thomas,

though only the last died of it.

The others had good livers, I guess,

so Berryman used a gun like his father

though Bukowski lived to seventy.

Who can love a healthy genius?

We want to believe the great must suffer greatly,

as if only Icarus flew above

those jealous eyes straining for pity

through the sea's glare

and Daedelus never landed.