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.

.