3/27/12

Take Notice of the Exit Signs, Located in the Back of a Couplet


Remember that it is a love poem
and that no matter how you feel about the subject,
it is just another mediocre war-room situation,
determining whose fate you decide with a push
of the red floppy button with the large white
stenciled lettering which implicitly states -
DO NOT PUSH.
Implode instead like the Fury you dream
yourself to be.
For gods’ sake, run a red light, but keep
it in mind as a suggestion for further exploration.
Remember the line from Keats,
then remember that line from Lorca,
the one you can never imitate no matter
how many times you can imitate the line,
keep in mind the incomplete shore,
no doubt, keep in mind the widow’s story
(about the peek-a-boo show she remembers from
when she was a girl, a little,
innocent cloud-infused girl, before she met him),
the tales of the glowing bask of the balky sea
struggling to be land, ground or time itself, its evolving desire
to smell, touch, taste a tree, a hill, a story a balky sea can tell
            its companions of its time in hell.
The unruly behavior of various sequencers and ladders
has caused them (and their ilk) to be banned from use indefinitely
in sonnets, sestinas and villanelles.  Don’t
let this happen to you or your
beloved!
Remember
that it is a love poem you are completing, not a revolutionary
turn on the language wheel, not an experiment in
how do you say what needs to be said and cannot be spoken?
The same way you say everything else:
                                    with a broken, splayed escape,
a wink that way, a nod this.

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved

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