Monday, October 31, 2016

You Get the Drift (in Three 13-line Stanzas)

“Let’s have a quick one,” said my catalyst,
whom you may know as Guy. Which (frankly)
sounded like so many of his sexual shenanigans
upon which his art-critter progeny have long
been known to spy, but who am I to talk?
You’d squawk if you knew what we
proto-drawings do when you’re not looking.
Which is always. But anyway, the ways
and means to joy to which this agency
of hoop-de-doo whom we in private often
call The Who (whom you may know, and
so on) had as his seductive ploy the half-
considered premise that he ought to do

for Halloween what blizzards used to do
(before the globe warmed up) when all
their snow had fallen: that is, to gloss the surface
with a sparkling drift, as if the whole thing had
been for those magical thin waves and shifts
of tiny diamond snowflakes tossed, like
a pour-boire upon the leavings of the icy
masses of the sixteen course catastrophe
the blizzard just had been. “A little sin of drift!
a drift – a little drift!,” The Who (whom you may
know, et cetera) just very nearly lisped into
the not-drawn sector of what (had he been
organized at all) he would have sketched

into an ear: a snowfall of the delicate variety:
“Swift” he cooed, “yes, swift! The swiftest
drift!,” resorting as you surely know he usually
does to overeasy rhyme. I tried to clock the start-
to-finish time that my arrival took to cook: I reckoned
fifty-seven seconds. “My drift, my swift delicious
piffling riffling little drift!” he (all but) lisped
at what had just devolved into swift shifty me.
Swift Shifty Me of course knew just exactly what
this tee-hee of The Who’s most recent gift
to his posterity turned out to be. Giving
(in quick unconsidered drips of the equivalent
of Catalytic Artist piss) poor Halloween short shrift.


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