8 December 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 4

Notes on A Poem That Was Lost

by C. L. BLEDSOE

177/178: sallow, glowing… smelly tunnel: We all know what he's talking about, and there is no need to sully the eyes by making it concrete.

179: Lightning can't reach me here: The author refers to his heretical and now illegal pro-debauchist beliefs which, essentially lay the blame for mankind's failures squarely on the shoulders of psychology, which was at this time considered a science.

181: Wooden hearted and dumb: Clearly he is referencing that terrible translation he loved so much of Valentroika's Russian epic, "Uncle Winter," in which the author melodes that "when my mother's voice grew unheard my heart/became cold as wood/laid in the ground for millennia."

It is well documented that the author obsessed over the untimely sickness of his mother in a manner similar to other pre-debauchist outlawed writers such as E. A. Poe, even going so far as to refer to himself as such.

185: The Bastard: A person born outside of the bond of Holy Union. The existence of such a person goes far to explain the degeneracy of a society that could even give rise to a belief system like that held by the author.

The reference itself refers to the fact that the author was a user of tobacco for a decade, until marrying an asthmatic. The couple soon split, though there is no mention of his wife's death and one can only surmise that he used his influence to keep this from the public reference. The author continued to abstain from "that old Kentucky blue" "out of deference to the pets," he was often heard to say.

187: led to cancer: Coincidentally enough, the majority of the author's family suffered from some sort of cancer, as did most Americans, obviously, and yet he laughed at them.

It should be noted that these lines were written in the last century, when the leading ca