Wasted Youth

For John Keats

“I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn”
John Keats Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, (September 21^st 1819)

“The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821)

In Pisa, in the palace
where Shelley wrote Adonais
they shoot up heroin now
and syringes group in the
corners of the ruins
grasses growing through them
as they continue from the cracks.
Spent little cylinders
flecked with the rust of blood.
The view from the gallery
is part antique, part industrial
and it’s ugly where it’s not frozen.
The surface of the Arno
flotsam forming letters
legends dissipating in the flow.

In Hampstead in the garden
by the plum tree twice replaced
unseasonal flowers are in bloom beneath
where the older tree shaded only grass
and a place for a chair.
Rest for a small brown bird
with a song science calls unremarkable.
The lawn here well tended
wealth and fame of patrons of the arts
securing pleasance and the friendly
shadow of a library.
Here lived a friend
he called close with a candle
to witness a droplet of breath
on his bedsheet
flecked with the rust of blood.

James Piers Taylor, 4th February 2007 London

IMAGE: Sketch of the Dying Keats (1821) by Joseph Severn.