Just one lone quatrain in the old notebook this crazy-busy week:
“Rats can’t vomit.“
Thus are the curled lips
of the Wall Street bankers
always impeccably dry.
So let me offer up another sample from one of my old notebooks. This particular poem, written with my old friend Joe Nigg in mind, is riddled with mixed metaphors that make it unsuccessfully baroque—but I still like the playful music of it, pretty much….
Lexicomania
for Joe Nigg
We labor with language, our honed wits
flashing like sewing needles in a sweatshop.
But it’s no sweat.
We like it.
It keeps us
keen and intensely busy. It’s not the product,
not the cloth—which fits or doesn’t, lasts
or frays, flows out in patterns already dated
or perfectly in fashion—not the damned cloth,
but making’s cadence. A rhythm that rocks us,
man, around the clock, like waves coming in:
the tide we think in time with, though we know
its beat isn’t the measure of truths being woven:
only the unraveling palaver of our hearts.
Well, let’s see if the next week proves more fruitful!