I.
Or we have known you by the name of Ezra,
Son of Homer and an heir to Thoth, of
Whom it’s said the world was sprung forth from
Through sound
& assembled perhaps –why not— through cough
Nor would we think it was beneath
A technocrat of creativity to
Thread the fretwork of the Earth
A little closer to the margins
Propertius, that unpropitious fool:
An heirloom not passed down to you
Without a great too many centuries of misuse
At the hands of lesser siblings
Sitting, bending, breaking
At the dais of inkstands
Gods! What desks I’ve seen
What tones of men –especially among the least
Latticed of them; the cordial,
Editorial, peremptory monodrones;
The one-winged, circular and intricately
Egg-shaped profiteers of novelty and
–by-and-by—
A vintage and revamped bygone
But hark:
–I have this proneness to digress,
Consider it the inheritance of
Having fed a kilo – what?— or two
Too weak –a kilowatt too much of poet’s meat
To cattle-bowelled apparatchiks
Draped in sensible, immaculate white towels
The men, in brief (in briefs?)
Form part and uniformly inform
That which you yourself and I and some unhappy few
Have termed conformity in art–
The press, sir! Or whatever you
Would like to call it from your
Point of view:
[INSERT EXPLETIVE, AND ENSURE
YOUR INTERJECTION IS ORIGINAL AND
RATHER CRUDE]
But stay! To say that I digress
Would be an understatement sir,
I do digress, I do,
–but proudly, like a Shandy, yes!
II.
In the beginning was the verve,
A protozoan ursonate
The likes of which no cochleaed ear has ever heard
Shape has been wrought by echoes with no
Reason to exist (the lot had nothing t’echo’gainst
& so they voted for too many things)
Your hawkish ancestor, the coppery Ægyptian scribe,
Traduced himself by slipping mickies into time
To push his regency of
Transformative currencies around,
So that one day we were left with no more
—and no less— than our Mr. Pound:
The diamantine rock-drill
You have known by other names
“For you shall know me by the spoor-path of derailing skeins:
I have been sent to heal through words
What words through words alone have made unsound”.
& with these words, the wordsmith hammered on the noun
That’s set to sink the world back into pounds.