“My Prison Cell of Paradise”, Ode to Nabokov

May it ever be without company,

Without impenetrable company,

That so insults my individuality.

Damp gravel under an open window,

Sun through a closed window, so, do I thrive in the melancholy of the dark and damp for I invite it?

Not quite!

The sun like you say is an astringent for the soul, but it burns me and what for?

It is sickening yet wholly deserved, it is the cheap spirit of our space.

Though it possesses our outdoors, glimmers on water, dances on brick, it exasperates our shadows.

The skies often fall and bring with it the damp gravel my nose and mind love, while bullying the light away, births beautiful colour perceptive to the many- though not all.

Some do not see colour!

Our skies are adroit,

Not without transparency, but with delicate refraction.

What we see is fact to the spiritless pragmatist, art to the idealists.

But perhaps the damp is just as beautiful as the light,

For we cannot measure in human worth,

It’s splendour nor it’s atrocity.