Irony in Context

[1]

Little girls don’t crave

   aging poets, anymore,

   she wants me 

   to know.

She mentions this after

   reading a couple of minor,

   failed couplings

   of lines

   that speak to nothing 

   remotely resembling 

   the cravings of little girls.

But the horror, the atrocity

   of the lack of cravability

   anoints me

   nonetheless, this familiar

   haunt of recognition

   now thrust at my being.

I rebut:

Aging poets don’t crave little girls.

Aging, pale-hearted poets don’t crave big girls.

Aging, fat-kidneyed poets don’t crave medium girls.

Aging, eye-offending poets don’t crave.

Aging, motley-minded poets don’t crave the written word.

Aging, arthritic poets don’t crave the spontaneous invite to roller-skate.

Aging, fickle poets don’t crave the sharp wit.

Aging, gorbellied poets don’t crave the empty plate.

Aging, snail-headed poets don’t crave the glories of the brush, 

the message of the comb.

Aging, abecedarian poets don’t crave the invention of a new language.

Aging, facinerious poets don’t crave the fawning judgment of lights at ends of tunnels.

Aging, barren-spirited poets don’t crave.

Aging, shrill-tongued poets don’t crave the momentary sounding lapse.

Aging, puppy-headed poets don’t crave the shallow haberdashery.

Aging, closeted poets don’t crave the attention of the florescent,

the mindless joy of immemorialization.

Aging, Caesarian poets don’t crave the attentions of the junior faculties.

Aging, slope-nosed poets don’t crave the rough tissue.

Aging, blooming poets don’t crave the library’s inaccuracies.

Aging, flop-witted poets don’t crave conversations of the learned.

Aging, hook-footed poets don’t crave the summer wind

on a mid-July midnight’s beach journey.

Aging, mammering poets don’t crave the javelin of the isolated microphone.

Aging, cautelous poets don’t crave the honest moments of dialogue’s prayer.

Aging, panderly poets don’t crave the independent courtesan.

Aging, incontinent poets don’t crave the long or winding road,

the road not taken, nor

the climb up the mountain 

because it is there.

[2]

Accidents happen.

It was mournfully close to five a.m. when she asked 

me if I wanted to go over the rules one more time,

as if to stop the sadness of our repetitious discoveries

of new ways to create something different out of something

the same for the right people for the wrong reasons;

the tissue will tear.

No amount of tongued abeyance will succor the process of repair,

or allow the solitary voice to darn the missing space left in an air’s wave;

a good courtesan’s hard to find.

Who would want to anyway?  All the effort at woo, the spittled

expectations that will lead to exposure, to the scent of unfulfilled

forget-me-nots and the ties-that-unbind.

[3]

I shrug.  

What do I know.

Most days I’m lucky to get i before e except 

afterwards I will count

the solitary grains that each word 

leaves on the page, 

every letter its own innumerable 

stroke against the brush of mortality:

is that poetic 

enough for you?

That took almost an hour to think of, 

another ten minutes to twiddle,

a few blips to find the file in the folder, 

some formatting was performed,

and then, what with the typos 

     and the misdirections 

and the fiddling

memory, another three minutes 

to type out this line about pencil

shavings holding off death.

What innocence abides in the poet’s heart 

that he is not as venal

as the senator, or the artist?  

No innocent wilting flower the poet,

more the understandable lack of lobbyists’ pitches:  

bribery imparts a soul’s price,

it’s true, 

but without suffering and moral conflict, 

what source of wallow can the good poet

turn to?

Might as well get paid, 

might as well lay down

a line here about the dignity of the nation,

or the heart of the people, 

or the steadfastness of the spirit

in the face of unbearable

governmental constipation.

Of course I cheat.  Shut up.  Who doesn’t?

That’s why Roget invented the thesaurus.

Of course it died with the brontosaurus 

and the peggie-sueasaurus,

but there are extant copies still lying around, lying:

cover is not to shadow

as seclude is not to pillow;

I had to look up crave to measure its strength,

and then I urgently sought to implore 

your many-colored permissions 

to crave you.

I lie.

I lie in wait.

I lie in the moment.

I lie like Patchen’s fiery tiger,

              (burning bryght?)(no)

the desires of the poet at bay in this place;

lie precisely about the essence 

of knowing the difference between 

abjuration and ambition, between

hallucination and hunger, between

inclination and indecision, between

trust and despair.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All rights reserved