Born of the Vocative O!

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Sadomasochistic Poetic Prologue

O! Like a poet in hot July,

packed into a parka to fry,

crowing his vocative O’s to try

to get at the essence of living a lie,

I’d have asked the lowest fee

from whoever required of me

that I take his prose upon my knee

and pummel it into poetry.

But I had readier meat!

Alone I could pull off that feat:

take my own vocative O!

right after it goes through its olio

of unfenced syntactical sprawl,

then smack it back into a crawl,

prefigure its fate with a curse:

configure it into fake verse,

nobly shaped into quatrains.

Look closer, you’ll see the chains:

below which a pulse sometimes

betrays its ache for rhymes.

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But mostly why whatever I write these days must all

but always be counted as pronouncement, not argument –

effusion, not measured consideration – is because its form

is a cry, a stream of clauses born of the vocative O!

This form allows me not only to say what I apparently

want to say, but not to care, as certain un-hinged humorists

(Gracie Allen and Jonathan Winters their progenitors)

are seen not at all to care about the consequences

(anyway not all that much; you can't upset the cart

completely and still be funny). Not that I'm after effect

for the sake of it (exactly) – I do hold my truths to be self-

evident – I may even have a priestly mission! – but

because this whole business (a word I use a lot to stand

in for 'Everything': suggesting infinite self-interested

bureaucracy, at least it's funnier) is an entertainment.

That's where I shall always orbit the sun of Alan Watts.

I do it because I feel like doing it. I love it. It’s a joy.

Like a scream! Or a pleasant offhand dabble of a finger

in the stream. Wouldn't that sort of disinhibition guarantee

incoherence, chaos, entropy? Maybe if it also had a dose

of hateful belligerence, though that would constrict not

disinhibit. If it’s done because it thrills me unrestrictedly,

it will free me to be clear; I’ll just maybe do it in unsuspected

ways. To want to entertain is, or can be, to want to keep

myself as central a part of this engagement I’m apparently

in as I can (another truth I hold to be self-evident). I want

to be as interested and delighted as I want everyone else

to be! I think I find my greatest coherence in such a state.

Indeed I can't imagine any other condition which could

induce me to relish – as (sounding the vocative oh!) I do –

lifting a pen or a pencil or the other phenomenon we now

all recall begins with “p-e-n”. Yup, that especially.

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