Halt!

Halt! O Ralph, you poor little lamb!
Do not ignore your love for the iamb,
Do not trespass into that cursed world,
Undulate your fate with comfort,
Find in an illusionary resplendent world
Your silken sheet adorning a dearth
Of famed ancient rhymes and forms
Piled into ballads and sonnets in dark dorms
In sullied, putrid, acrid harmony bind,
Your lofty dreams contain, softly utter disdain.
O Ralph! Revel not in traps of time
Revel not in that cursed realm of pain
Where there’s neither yourself in ink bathed
Nor your incendiary passion abated;
But abated is your soul’s melancholy song
Awakened is folly’s distressful worldly jig
Under liquor and all else that is wrong,
Yet, perhaps enough to rescue from its trick
Vile trick, Ralph! Here, I tell you poor toad,
How those warts have come to your abode
And mend your youth into a senile soul,
While you gossip and dream and drive
Your life in white that will devour you whole
And all that’ll be left is a sonnet beneath a thyme
To taste upon a legacy that might have been
If upon the ocean your cage you would’ve seen.