And It's Not Poetry...

…so we’ll have to call it something else.

We’ll call this one avenue.

But it’s not so far to go to the word, and road 

or dirt is all we need to get us there-venue.

Avenue might be too grand for our purposes.

(Although I’ve yet to see Ferlinghetti’s

fifty lanes dashing us to our despair,

I’ll benefit the doubt, and know they’re there.

Larry is a smart man, and not given much

to hyperbole.  Well, except maybe when he killed

Christ.  Or left him dead, rather.  Not as such

you might leave roadkill, well, but yes, exactly built

the same way.  You read and think he’ll be saved,

but in the end? still dead.)  Avenue is Old French,

by the way, from the even Older Latin, having to do

with arriving, or approaching, or coming to; 

and because I’m lazy, I made up therevenue, a flinch

of the pen to play with a versus there, but also,

the rev-et cetera..  Like this’ll ever see a dime of profit.

See, that’s Poetry for you, as it understands itself to

be:  Capitalized.  Important.  We can credit the socialized

state of the art (homonyms are not rhymes, per se); therefore,

all of my attempts to make a prophet look wise some ways back

fell short.  Poems about poems suck.  It’s such a chore

to be odd.  Or different.  New is out of the question.

(A rhyme here for suck will, incidentally, be repressed on

the grounds of unnecessity.  As though in Poetry,

necessity counts for anything.  Please.)  The audacity

of the spirit that assumes too much, that expects puns

from two languages back to have any weight.  Who cares?

I might as well be singing of hot-crossed buns

or playing duckduck-goose.  Like vestal prayers

to virgins                                                              you play it loose

                    (Poetry as pickup line?  Nah…),

and fasten your whims to a strangled ghost that’s sooooo obtuse

you might as well be laying a madrigal.  On a lute.

Or I guess Pan’s flute would work.  Wait.  He played the pipes,

and was sort of a Satyr.  Which is not to say.  The point’s moot

anyway.  The Sileni do not loan themselves to silence; types

like that never do.  They play the martyred ancients, poor drunks,

and yell ‘Get in the hole!’ at mostly inappropriate times.

Okay, like it’s ever not malapropos to speak of someone’s hole

in a derogatory fashion.  From Poetry’s view, if it rhymes,

go with it.  If it shows compassion at some level, it’ll be like you stole

the Hope Diamond, or the Faith, and got away scot free.  Monks

can’t do better begging for their sustenance!  Like they do any good

and/or are necessary to this world’s flow.  Some strange cognizant

guilt-be-ridden neighbors support the monastery.  This lyrical dissonance

they provide doesn’t dance, can’t rhyme, and like some shadowed hood

in the alley, expects us to patronize their beingness.  Who do they think

they are?  Poets?  Who must, perforce, believe in their souls that their ink

sustains a little corner of the world?  (Boy, that’s cheap.  Ink and think.

Good thing this is free.  I’d’ve had to offer refunds for that, for playing hurt;

like the number twelve guy on a five guy team, Poetry forgives the effort

of the bench warmers and the also rans.  Doesn’t mean to say it redeems

anything regarding the last place finishers.  Forgot, forlorn, lil’ light beams

in the dark.  Oh, all these wasted struggles…you can google

forgotten poet and come up with a gabillion pages of hits.  No, you can’t

(I tried), but you get a bunch.  More than I wanted to check, and they’re all

so sad, so earnest in their endeavors.  This disheartening rant

against mortality.  ‘S’what it amounts to.  Some inexorable trawl

of ‘Remember Me’ to this world’s regrets, to this word’s discounts,

let us forgive our debtors even as we hope they forgive our debts.

I’ve laid on the backs of every single one of them, the dead, the not yets,

and have been repaid with papercuts and a cricked neck, sore wrists

and aspirations I shall not meet.  We are almost back around to Larry’s

dead Christ (misspeak, and it works), and these sullen stupid twists

are exactly most of the problem.  Where the excreted marries

itself to wit.  Or lack thereof, more the case.  This dubious emblem

of where we’ve been, to where we’re going, this avenue of regret.

I write.  And word fails me.  Repeatedly.  This road of abet,

this dirt of forget.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved