More on the Continuing Crisis

Descended as a child, and when I did, was

Sprung from the leaf of the Word, writ

Large between the vellum covers,

The acrid ink as a piece of aluminum

Forged with yellow, the metaphor dropped

Into the swaddling fluids of the mother

Who would harbor magenta, sentence and ill

For her package until she met her final

Elliptical end, period, break.  New

Paragraph.  The comma imbued a sense

Of ceaselessness at a young age and, granted

The minor teals of metabolism and analogy,

I became a dashing tilde upon the fabric

Of the world’s table of contents.

Under the circumstances, my father 

Was forced to perform heroic feats

To remain steadfastly altruistic and gray

As far as speed would allow.

In my opinion, subject was merely a hope.

In my opinion, then, object was obstacle

And fallen justice.

One only sings of simile in the face

Of protest.  I denied the predicate

And took umbrage at false et ceteras.

The image of the ergo, its false

And embittered ochre of empathy,

Infuriated my lithesome, turquoise mind;

I embraced the power of the possessive.

Imperative tenses became the rule,

The scrimmed image behind the image,

The image that replaced the image

So I would not see the image,

And I took bicycle to heart and path,

Seeking the source of the final

Annotation.  Trying to be as one

With the index, I soured

On encyclopedias and sought true

Aqua and maroon in the flesh

And stone of such temporalities

As time, ground, Tupperware.

I cited a fragrant miasma of wheat

And intestine in my path 

To the codex, but found

Acceleration harder to achieve

Than light.  The roman a clef

Gnawed at my adolescent

Identification and I climbed the blue

Acknowledgement of Speak, Misspeak,

Erase.  How origin failed me

In my analogies, how the winsome

Strains of punctuation let me down

Repeatedly in my beginnings.  Dropped

Now here as an umlaut, splashed now there

As a seemingly errant apostrophe,

I ventured verse

And run-on sentence to get around

To stanza.  The corpus tempus

Found my paragraph, termed it edible,

And I was encrusted with the jewels

Of contrasting ethics.  

Rhetoric mentions a slimy haven

In its annals where all good or indifferent

Poetics may go to expire.

I attempted quietude in my passing,

An effort to tell the parchment that my end

Pages had not been fully met

In their cobalt sense of wonderment.

Great scorn befalls the unsharpened pencil,

The un-inked quill, and I furiously

Engaged the quatrain to equal

Meter where not Tone.  Where not Tone

With no Character, with no Character

Where no Plot, no Plot 

To give no Settings, give no Settings

To no conclusion.

To not conclude 

Becomes the vermilion verse,

The last seek of embeddings.

I stand, now awkward, now tin, now

Lime, at haunt to the author’s note, and a

Pasty blurb regarding statement and intent.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved