Making Like Daphne

A Sort of Manifesto

Random rhythm, pitch and tessitura – less bravura
than obscenely rash – brash city birdsong splits the dawn,
grates and gores you – indiscriminate display – antic chaos –

bloody ancestors of dinosaurs in service of exactly nothing
edible to comprehension, reproducible to human sight.

Beats the stuffing out of you what it’s about: this oddly
ardent proud collective shout. Like a bunch of poets in a pout.
You do not do the things that others do, as far, at least,
as you are able to construe: you are a hybrid and a stew
and slew of easy rhymes, improbable excursions into psyche:

words are not your servants and you lack the least criteria
to claim a place among their alphabet: but something
in your aberrance exacts an arrogance – self-administers
a tincture of a secret animating DNA – and hoop-de-doo
you alchemize away: become the child, finally, of play

eviscerating into absence: absent mom and dad whose
admiration could be had through art: the overwhelming realm
whose sneaky fits and starts perversely here insist on
something cavalier and easy – just a simple tossed-off
alchemy: to demonstrate the absolution of this absolute:

nothing can be found in niches: there has never been a poem
or a drawing worth a thing that wasn’t really something else.
All you know is when you go to sit upon a toilet thinking
you are there for excretory purposes your unsuspecting
surfaces combine to make like Daphne coalescing roughly

into plant: a tree and undiscovered source of peony and bush
and leaf and branch. Which somehow right from where it’s
rooted makes its strange imaginative way back to the source
of sway and play that constitute the thing you do. Sing-zoo-
bling-true-swing-new. Lovely flings rhymes bring you.

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