Eyes closed, my breath deep and crawling, I turn
The slick leaf's texture over in my mouth,
Then fold its sharp edge beneath my warm tongue.
I see myself as eternity's king:

Loosed as in a vacant, endless sea,
I swim without worries, pains or constraints.
All judgment gone, every human ill is
Forgotten. The mountains here are pebbles.

No, the tin drone of regular life
With no soft and sugared medicine
To expand the taste and touch of things
Would be total, unbearable torture.

Someone speaks now, with fever, of return
To Greece. His words already are distant.

-5/25/2000

Lo"tus-eat`er (?), Lo"tos-eat`er (?), n. Class. Myth.

One who ate the fruit or leaf of the lotus, and, as a consequence, gave himself up to indolence and daydreams; one of the Lotophagi.

The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters. Tennyson.

 

© Webster 1913.