.

Today is like a crumpled piece of paper,
white-on-white blowing up and down the street.

I am sitting by a window, sipping coffee,
watching white fill up the sky.
Beside me is a book, old and green,
leather-bound with gold-lined vellum,
filled with Tennyson's words.
"An incantatory poet", Harold Bloom declares.
Lord Alfred must be read aloud
with all the melodrama of his Maud:
From Maud as his Inferno,

"And my heart is a handful of dust."

to TS Eliot's,

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

Queen Victoria's well-funded poet laureate leaves his mark.

But what is that line between passion and nonsense?
Where is that edge?
Perhaps genius lies in not quite knowing.

"There has fallen a splendid tear
From the passion-flower at the gate.
She is coming my dove, my dear;
She is coming my life, my fate;
The red rose cries, "She is near, she is near",
And the white rose weeps, "She is late",
The larkspur listens, "I hear, I hear,
And the lily whispers, "I wait."

Tennyson; the poetic style of his age.
With dark and brooding eyes. And uncontrollable hair.
His chaos born of that same era
as the fabulous Victorian nonsense poet, Lewis Carroll,
who scribbles Tennysonian pastiche
into his 'sincere' verses of love and regret.
Such deprecation. But Tennyson, nonetheless.
All his words contained inside a leather-bound green book,
ideas transformed by black and white on gold-lined vellum,
kept safe behind a small glass door inside a wooden cabinet,
the one with a marble lamp on top.

Tennysonian pastiche.

It's a Tennyson kind of day,
dark and deep within,
but cold and white without.