At The End Of The Bar.

The pose is just right,

unmistakably Keatsian,

the folded hand beneath the chin,

supporting the head,

the eyes only half there,

half-engaged within,

composing, consorting with gods.

There he is away at the end,

nicely framed in the mirror,

still young from afar,

the spectacles the only anomaly,

the eyes now aged,

as aged as the rest of him,

this early nineteenth-century superstar

sitting in an early twenty-first-century bar.