Classic Poem

We drink whiskey,
chat about Virginia Woolf's life and
the skirt-tails of the lady who left on the rocking horse.
The rocking horse threw its rider, making no one but the bells cry out,
then it departed into autumn. Stars are shooting in the whiskey bottle.
Heartbroken stars shatter softly in my heart.
The girl I so briefly knew
grows up near the garden's grass and trees,
and when she casts off the shadow of love and hate, the very truth of love,
literature dies and life dies
and the beloved rider of the rocking horse disappears.
With the coming and going of time
we avoid isolation for a while, then wither away,
now we must say farewell.
The whiskey bottle carries the sound of toppling in the wind,
we must gaze into the eyes of the old-woman writer.
. . . . . . to the lighthouse . . . . . .
Even when its light doesn't shine
we must remember the plaintive sound of the rocking horse
for the sake of our easily amassed pessimism of the future.
Whether everything passes away, whether it dies,
we must cling to the dim awareness that lingers in our hearts,
we must listen to Virginia Woolf's doleful story.
Like a snake finding its youth in a crack between two stones,
we must open our eyes, we must drink another shot.
Life isn't lonely at all,
it's just vulgar like a magazine cover.
Are we departing because we fear that hapless something?
The rocking horse is in heaven,
but the jingling of bells surrounds my ears,
and the strangled autumn wind
cries from within my toppled whiskey bottle.