All hail Strunk and White, supreme law on Word.
If I don't act in accordance with them
I'll be casted as the fool on a whim:
Idiosyncrasies stamped out by a herd.

My summations are wholly gnomic.
Some call these articulations "weakness,"
Others, being driven, lettered, undress
Them imperceptibly. I'm Homeric
Without grandeur of high-flown rhetoric.
Epics I pen dissolve the world's heart
And suffer abandonment in K-Mart,
Pulp-paged and forgettable. Ironic?

Yes, but such sentiment is commonplace.

"When the pious Cabbalist Rabbi Simon ben Jochai came to die, his friends said that he was celebrating his wedding." — C. G. Jung

I loved away my youth,
Mistook passion for a truth
By which one's will is lead.
The journey of the "dead"
Replaced my singular life,
And Death became my wife.

Through silver maple and winding hedgerow wind-songs sough April’s hearsay. In stoic silence, spring’s axes—shuttered trunks—goad their fruit’s swelling. Clouds tumble in like sea foam, blue splinters flashing out: incorporeal troposphere, a halo entrapped by math.

1.
It's odd Time never came
To wonder under these beaches' loam,

To walk forty steps to a tide
Where sea-green foam flashes full its blade.

     2.
     Trammeled like a nun, the girl
     Swept by me thoughtless. A root's gnarl

     Could symbolize slim pain
     Beneath the scleras: two jackals' den.

     3.
     Hurt inwardly, like darkened stars,
     So bursting silence is all one hears.

4.
The monotony of this shoreline is a throwback.
What phantoms come: an electric shock.

Why ten years ago is all I know
Is not half as important as who or how.

5.
The autumnal tremor, the rainless moonlight...
Memories of little weight....

Lemons fall into the grass
In late December.
Seeing them outside my window, I instinctually remember
Sensual spring and how it gives one tunnel-vision,
How it turns each fleeting thought to an unchangeable decision.
*But Time repeatedly brings what seems gargantuan to pass.

"Where literature is concerned,
I will not cooperate at all":
A mind resolutely turned
From the social crusades of fall.

Seventy-eight years later
I agree with the "dilettante";
Twenty-five years cater
To reclusion in a shanty,

"Writing frightening verse
To a straight-toothed dude
In New York." Curse
My reckless solitude!