For the sweet sake of inscapes
don’t be afraid to plead-
in fashion even plaid
does, for pattern, and now goes with
both flowers and stripes.
It may even be myth
that before a fall pride goeth.
Be proud to be outrageous
so long as you have an almost religious
regard for un-with-it truth.
If you want to, stick with rhyme;
that linguistic sunbeam
says things are, and are not, the same
as they were last year,
and I’m sure
that, accidental or intentional,
or external or internal, or both,
it does not, at least, represent sloth.
All of us feel losses, but we
were robbed, not of “the pastoral dream of youth”
so much as the pastoral dream of maturity.
Poets over forty, start to fight.
To write
“in mockery of system”
is the ultimate slavery
to system, of all things! Why rhyme?
To say I love you to language, especially now
that its only viable components seem to be
“like,” “y’know?” and “Wow!”,
to tickle the ear of those with musical savvy,
to break down the distinction between light verse and
heavy,
to say that human ingenuity
can walk hand in hand with responsibility.
It’s a challenge to chaos hurled.
Why use it? Why, simply
to save the world.
And why use measure? That linguistic sundial
is not just style but lifestyle,
telling us, pace Hamlet,
that after all—I’ll say it forever, damn it-
life in the harsh world’s worthwhile.
But don’t write those little tiny
poems like THE, centered on a blank page.
Even Henny-Penny,
when she thought the sky was falling,
considered it a more important outrage
than might be expressed in a poem like “Feeling /
tired by the midnight
of
it
all / I
went to bed.”
Surely, given mind and senses, there’s more to be said.
Since You Asked Me….
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