The Land of Fey

By Allyson Arndt

A hundred poems a day,
A hundred gnomes in the land of fey.
Not Kubla Kahn’s pleasure-dome,
But my own love song in the key of J. Alfred Prufrock,
Like if I just mortar and pestle enough escapism in with this realism
I’ll have a poultice for the wound of age
And it will fester less.

Lost in the mine,
A hundred thoughts resign
And I recline to keep the boxcars lumbering down the line,
Traveling less timely, rattling less sublimely in a collapsing mind,
But all in good time.
All in good time.

What then?
What other realities need relieving like a failing bladder?
But of course, the former is more proper than the latter,
More clean in a room of sterile things,
And I cannot die on machines.
I cannot live while pleading to be free;
That is no life for me.

I ponder my geography,
My eroding topography, changing more rapidly than any land,
Save Neverland.
These crepe paper wrinkles are not to be undone,
They’re meant to seep in, like ink from a pen—
Like a new artist’s hand that lines the work lightly
Before growing bold in experience and etching the paper.
I think of the elephant, craggy in appearance;
How foolish I have been
To dwell on such things.

A hundred poems a day,
A hundred gnomes in the land of fey.
My morphine mind keeps slipping in time
To places I’ve not seen and people I’ve not been,
And I wonder if it is Coleridge’s Xanadu or Dante’s Inferno,
The setting for my ending,
Toward which I am meandering,
But do let me go slowly, not too slowly,
So to savor slipping further into age,
Though no fine wine,
She hath good flavor.
Let me savor.
Really, this cosmic overworld, underworld concept,

Is too, too much
And somehow not enough to pique my interest;
A milky way ride full of predictable elevator music,
Creates a panic I cannot quell,
Or perhaps I’m already in hell,
Too early to tell. This isn’t going well,
Or so I’m told by a prat, a ninny turned bold on her deathbed,
Ready to cut to the chase, the point, the quick.
Just stick me with more needles if you must,
But out it will come before I am dust.
Ashes to ashes, we all fall to rust,
And I drown in a room of blue, no tea for two,
But let us eat cake and rendezvous.

A hundred poems a day,
A hundred gnomes in the land of fey.

Lucid, I rise in bed
To kiss your face,
To kiss her head.
It was always you, my loves,
Gifting night with diamonds mined, to add stars to the sky
And wish us more time.
Wherever I’m to land, understand
Once the dark snuffs out these fires,
Let me not be found a liar,
I will find you, though I be but whispers,
A feeling, a sense, a series of shivers,
Not to be denied, though never spied.
You are marked with iridescence,
Glowing shadows seen from space;
Your magnetic beings will be the place
Pulling me like string
Through galaxies most labyrinthine.

No more poems this final day,
I travel to the land of fey.