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Against This Age

Chapter 7: TO A CORPULENT SINGER
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About This Book

A collection of poems that probes urban modernity, loneliness, and aesthetic decadence through vivid imagery and jagged rhythms. Voices shift between intimate monologue, ironic portraiture, and brisk city scenes to examine alienation, desire, and the artist’s uneasy stance within commodified life. Nighttime and street settings recur, juxtaposing glamour and squalor, while playful language alternates with moral heat and satire. Short character studies, conversational pieces, and formal experiments combine into a varied sequence that interrogates social manners, mortality, and the imagination’s attempts to resist conformity.

TO A CORPULENT SINGER

I
Bulging maturity
Constructs an unfair version
Of curves not visible
To eyes upon the outside face.
II
If a soul is more
Slender than the motives of wind,
Flesh provides the necessary
Privacy, and in a rising voice
The soul proclaims its gratefulness.
III
Who has watched a bear
Pawing his idea of a breeze?
The audience in this falsely walled
Room is pouncing awkwardly
Upon the small part of a singer’s voice.
The actual sounds swing easily
To eyes and ears beyond the edge of earth.
IV
And if to this meandering
Of metaphysical remarks
I should add a face
Where tragedy experiments with lanterns
To aid a long, sharp nose and wondering lips,
And laughter is conscious of being
The excited, misunderstood child of a soul,
The singer would receive
Final details of her disguise.