I Thought of Writing about Beatniks And Ended up Writing About Platonic Self

As Socrates and Plato taught,

inside the Underworld

which Orpheus’ lyre and song

rendered open and unlocked

for a two-way road—

of men and women, their souls,

forgetfulness, oblivion,

comes and flows

deadlier than death itself

and worse than crimes, injustice,

one has done in the course

of one whole lifetime before.

Forgetfulness, oblivion—

that’s death in death,

a bond of bonds,

Devil’s gorging jaws,

and the loss that leaves

of the depth but a shell,

a rolled-up skin,

a mere dusting frost

of what has been breathed,

a void once in the eyes ensouled.

But the otherworldly oblivion

is self-forgetting above all

for without

the self that lives—on and on

again—the soul is gone—recedes

like a sound that has died off

as a hollowed beat, a spasm

from a closing tap of blood,

and the core—one’s heart

is no more the true love’s lyre

or the ear that heard God inside.