…..Suffocated Devotions

……….“the fame of his lost love”

Who cares about the love of Yazid choked

Forever in that clogging of the throat,

About Antinous, whose death is cloaked

In rumors and suspicions as they float

Above the marble whiteness of his myth,

Or Heloise as drowned as she in closed

Off convent purity?  They make a withe

Of suffering and adulation posed

Forever in that lost eternity

We call romantic history—the past—

The only type of pure fraternity

That older men can ever hope will last?

Who cares about these adorations doomed

By loss and broken circumstance consumed?