The Masque of Rhyme, these are--
Charles Alexander has very wonderfully
made little chap books of this poem I wrote four days ago,
and they're signed too.
So I got writer's cramp signing them, but--
so this is pushing rhyme and seeing what would come of that.
Adding my pee to the sea of rhyme,
it's time I admit sameness is a bit of a hoax.
Yes, my body lies over social oceans like yours and slightly
like Rover's, except that he barks to speak
and we speak to bargain and intermingle.
All translation in love and war, did you
hear the joke about the marriage of true mind
to impediment after impediment?
That's what we call language, at least around here.
What rhymes with rhythm, mythic?
You have to squint to hear it, squint and scatter letters
to the five senses, shake off circumstance and find yourself
in words, squatting amid ashes, while
the wicked affluent legislators dress for the ball.
Your feet ache and stink, the thought track
wakes and thinks novelty again, the same old novelty.
It's almost worse than royalty.
My biographical foot in the glass shoe, fate or Deja Vu.
The rhythm of days produces chills, stupor,
and after considerable training, a bunch of personal pronouns.
It's Thursday, history-- history's late as usual.
Meanwhile, some sexual traffic jam
has been goading us all into public revelation.
Offstage, fact, slapped value on the butt, and said, break a leg,
make a killing, show those suckers where to suck.
And value answered: don't be vulgar, fact,
unless you're speaking personally.
As for me where the bee sucks, there
suck I a meaner, a be-er, an arriviste tooling down
that divided highway leading where none they say ever
returns.
And when I don't come back, say I
told you everything about myself except the future,
lie alone in our bed of roses whence
they say poems arise to amuse the students when we've
gone to prose.
It's more tangled, but you hear those stuck horns blaring.
That's been my cue ever since I can remember.