Our Lady of Poetry

Apr21

Rhyming verse is a woman scorned
to whom lip service must be paid.
Set free from meter, unadorned
Her lyric fury waits, delayed
as she rambles on in a free verse swoon,
oblivious to whoever’s listening,
babbling to the crescent moon
illuminated, horned and glistening,
bathing her deluded mind
in lunar metaphors of doom.
Do not provoke her—treat her kind
and let her pass to a padded room
or an attic space beneath the eves
where she can rant and find release;
until her frenzied soul believes
that words have meaning…
and rests in peace.

Just want you to know:
Gender is given by God—
So don’t mess with it.

Hard Cell

Apr8

Free verse was captured,
confined to a cell
by readers unraptured
in modernist hell.

And there he did languish
while chained to the wall
and desperate in anguish
gave forth a last call:

“Listen and read me—
my muse is the best!
Applaud and then feed me,
your starving guest !

Don’t fall for that beat…
Please ignore their old line.
I’m here. I’m effete.
I’m a modern divine…

I like it in prison
No, really — I’m free!”
(But his lock was awaiting
Your Readership’s key.

For the moderns all lie,
as your readership knows;
Modern poets don’t die—
they just decompose.)

Autonomy in Catatonia

Apr17

A DELETED TEXT IN 3 MOVEMENTS:

I.
surfeited
fractured syllabub i babble
cyber-clot the glutted universal drain
awakening ruined dreamscapes
drenched in pre-verbal rain i run
to archive linguists
archaeology inundates desire
no caps
no guns
cowboys indianed
in the wounded dawn matinee
the double-featured matriarch
the humble daily heresy
unmanifest density

II.
fêted/fetid
dog-star of your corpse breath
hound tooth on hag flank
reveling ruined symmetries
mythologize nothing less than true
all parties ended
distilled the useless pistil
of prayer

III.
unsought arcana
sister-shroud immaculate
rough bolt-bearer of Lydian cloth
shoplifted theft of history
who wove you
into our self-deception
warped mother
of the weft