Poetry by Ryan Quinn Flanagann
In the Kawarthas Thinking of the Lake Poets Strung Out on Opium, Words and the View Sure, Coleridge was a Wordsworth fanboy, but I always thought him the better scribe. Taking that albatross of opium dreams as far as bad teeth were willing to chatter. And Southey sliding into third although Bryon claimed him thrown out by establishment leanings. Both Lambs lead to slaughter and De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater which must have made Samuel Taylor want to race Kubla Khan straight to the bottom of the laudanum bottle. Addiction in popular literature and not just for it. And here I am beside wifey’s warm jam jams. In the Kawarthas, thinking of the Lake Poets strung out on opium, words and the view. How the Edinburgh Review coined the term trying to slander a little drummer boy out of his only percussion. But the name stuck, as such things often do and who remembers anything about the critic now? That’s what I adore about this guttural bullfrog of a cosmos. How the hodge of the podge never clamps down on salty bitters. Beside this fire reinvented, on the water and off the clock. Heavy gangplank eyes uncorking another bottle. Leaning back in twin Adirondacks wishing the loon out of every asylum. The howl of distant wolves across this long unanswered wilderness.
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez, and The Oklahoma Review.
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