The Voice at 3:00 AM

Today I sat outside in the Coco Bar, drinking rich cinnamon hot chocolate and reading the last pages of The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems by Charles Simic. I've always really liked this poet, ever since I read The World Doesn't End, about a decade or so ago. His writing is haunting and surreal, filled with ghostly characters and presences, funny and existential non-sequitors, and Old World locations.

Reading a whole collection of any poet sort of numbs me out. I hear each individual poem less and less clearly the more familiar I get with the voice, the cadence of imagery, the idiosyncratic diction.

RELAXING IN A MADHOUSE

They had already attached the evening's tears to the windowpanes.
The general was busy with the ant farm in his head.
The holy saints in their tombs were burning, all except one who was a prisoner of a dark-haired movie star.
Moses wore a false beard and so did Lincoln.
X reproduced the Socratic method of interrogation by demonstrating the ceiling's ignorance.
"They stole the secret of the musical matchbook from me," confided Adam.
"The world's biggest rooster was going to make me famous," said Eve.
O to run naked over the darkening meadow after the cold shower!
In the white pavilion the nurse was turning water into wine.
Hurry home, dark cloud.

(I couldn't reproduce the line breaks here, because of something in the website's formatting...)