Such transports as true poetry provides
In raptures of the soul, and lyric rides,
May carry one beyond the lofty heights
In chariots of sun on drunken nights.
Whether true odyssey or shorter trip,
Homeric craft or humbler sort of ship,
The poet’s chosen stowaway rides free;
The ticket paid for literarily.
And afterward, the traveler comes home
Enriched by distant sights and worlds unknown.
Poets: a pathetic lot—
Who sing, off-key, of their own refusing.
On a quest for what is not,
Entranced with their own maudlin musing
In that zone where life gets buffered
As the pages load; confusing
Pain with what their souls have suffered:
Lyric bombs for your defusing.
Plumed Serpent/Fabled Phoenix/Rare Black Swan:
Let Poetry now shoot you from the sky;
Your sin, though trendy, shall no more rage on . . .
They’ll see you’re just a Dodo by and by.
You puffed and fanned, a dazzling Peacock Star
It’s high time you descended here to earth.
We see you for the Emu that you are:
Your gender, like your sex—assigned at birth.
Huddled in your castles like Prospero’s doomed revelers, sighing in the springtime of contagion, you evade and avoid the obvious. But the Muse has entered, unseen, and stands among you in her mask of elegiac splendor. She smiles as you mock her presence. She laughs quietly to herself as her influence wafts upon the very air, inspiring and infecting all concerned. You try to protect yourselves from the lyric epidemic, nonetheless her viral poetic molecules go forth, regroup, mutate, and attach themselves to the souls of her detractors. Her spores hang upon the very droplets of the mist, a suspended Parnassian miasma. The first tremors of poetic sickness begin to shudder deep within and among the most reluctant revelers. They try to dispel their fears; they brag and congratulate themselves, chattering about the uselessness of poetry, listing all they ways in which they have successfully barricaded themselves from her pestilential presence. But the Muse has entered and none can ensure her departure. Poetry will have her way and resistance is futile. Some will survive, but others will meet her as their avenging angel of the plague, and neither Egyptian magic nor sanitizing legerdemain shall deter the blossoming vector of her influence. Fear, oh unpoetic readers, this sudden lyrical acceleration, this verdant celebration:
our poetic coronation.
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