Raven Says by Laurinda Lind

Want to talk about
a dreary midnight? How
about Eddy, parsing 
Paracelsus, threadbare 
drunk and mooning about
the dark? Actions have
consequences, if you go
gloomy you get me 
and my deadpan word 
that wows them in 
their drawing rooms 
with their death wishes,
their love of laudanum. 
 
Some people aren’t 
pleased to live anymore, 
give or take a Lenore, 
or Eddy with four more 
years of his bad living to go. 
I could stay, enjoy the show 
perched here on a statue. 
Pity the person who comes 
to clean his study once Eddy 
stumbles off over the edge 
of the earth, searching 
for all his gone girls.

Laurinda Lind lives in New York’s North Country. Some publications/acceptances are in Blue Earth Review, Midwest Quarterly, New American Writing, Paterson Literary Review, and Spillway; also anthologies Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (New Rivers) and AFTERMATH: Explorations of Loss and Grief(Radix).