Macabre: An Observation of T.S. Elliot's --The Waste Land

T.S. Elliot

It seems poets everywhere

(lounging in Bavarian coffee shops
and Teutonic kaffegeschäft,
to those swishing down
Austria’s sugar slopes)

are obsessed with excruciation.

Termination.

Macabre I say, macabre.

Je ne sais rien
about bards who write
of blue-haired tortoises
slumped over rooks and queens,

pawns of humanity;

inevitable, unavoidable,
a plague infesting itself.

I am not stunned--
no, not now
Eliot’s Waste Land

is the down-trodden's
blood dripping
from his eyes;

their hunger, poverty,
and desperation;

the ink within his pen.