Perennial Failure

1.

The poet. He not only lives awake on the page

Nor on the edge of an eyelid fuming with colors

And passionate birds of memory and the present

Beautiful lake in front of which he eats rice cake.

Those, sure, but in singing in his art, conscious

Of his own fart and part in the din of the streets

And screechy malls, his donation to the buzz of

Electrons in the daily grind of man’s wirings,

Communicativeness, he nests among cucumbers

Pickled with vinegar, then admires the inevitability

Of sour destructions. The beauty of form, godly

Dedication to norms and all divergences result

In a diary-like journalism involving minutes,

Minutiae and minuscule eruditions of corruption,

Consequent calamities and lost funds. Last to know

He promises not to be, to the least knowledgeable

He swears to deliver both music and company,

Chanting rhythms, prancing among rhymes, yea

His way to your information, disgust declarations,

Social dysfunctions, sleaze, his pen scratching,

All this while retracting to the mine of blue lights

Upon lyrical objects of delight—the fights among

Pastoral ants, flights of fancy, flimsy odes, syllabic

Consonants—a perennial measure sailing, failing.

The constant battle. Pleasure versus the leisure

Of looting and abuse of power, assassination of

Dissenters, movement against political art, decors

On the chest of collaborators, the “meat” of art,

Without which latter nothing but a music inside

The head, sans the politics of violins, sad guitars,

Notates the poem’s whole notes and not, like whole

Milk from absent cows. Dreams of snorers and

Those who refuse to believe that poetry is not

At all the art of the pedantic master of syllables

Or creator of stanzaic, worrisomely eccentric tics.

It is painting—with lines denying, crying verities.

2.

In the flood, he thought of saving all his manuscripts.

In his blood, and eyes, poetry awoke and floated to survive.