Why is he Vaticanizing
when he could be catechizing ?
This silly man with a funny hat
this doddering puppet
with his dead Jesus on a stick
this irrelevant vestigial *****
this geriatric Marxist-Lite
outdated Liberationist
terminal Global Warmist;

no wonder the World
heeds his incoherent discourse.
No wonder they
listen to him
but hate the Truth.

Frozen rage
slices my cucumbers
slashes my prices
(so abysmally low)
the paralyzed contortion of my
dull & depressing
confession bleeds depression
on the scabs
of terminal teenage nihilism.
Listen to me ooze
oh poison world.
I unleash weak venom
(bad free verse)
I despise the birth that lifed me
and ... and...
(whoops - better take my meds and make sure mommy paid my data-plan this month.)

‘TERENCE, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,         
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, ’tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow.         
Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme
Your friends to death before their time
Moping melancholy mad:
Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’

  Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,         
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,         
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter ***         
To see the world as the world’s not.
And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past:
The mischief is that ’twill not last.
Oh I have been to Ludlow fair
And left my necktie God knows where,         
And carried half way home, or near,
Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer:
Then the world seemed none so bad,
And I myself a sterling lad;
And down in lovely muck I’ve lain,         
Happy till I woke again.
Then I saw the morning sky:
Heigho, the tale was all a lie;
The world, it was the old world yet,
I was I, my things were wet,         
And nothing now remained to do
But begin the game anew.

find less than arresting: stilted musings gem-set

in ardent verbiage.

recherché semantics, florid phrases facing a withering sun

or policing of metaphor –

until handcuffed: Italic jewel thief caught on surveillance

Sudden bewildering

                                        spaces with odd punctuation;  ?  &

inward dithering semi-confessions in serpentine

verse.  Badder (or worse)  annoying line

           breaks /

cloying internal half – rhymes,

overwrought.     Over-edited;

over-thought until  you want to see

what’s on TV instead.        As if

the poet’s every random musing was so

essential.  Reverential semi-precious mythos

(Siren’s distant waves echo, shipwrecked rocks: Ossifer,  ossifer –

it’s only boring poetry…

                        I’m so sorry. I’ll never do it)

again.

New York! –
The poets you have bred are few,
And how to rhyme they’ve not a clue –
Oh, fork!
(I know that word should sound like ‘muck’,
But that would make this effort ****);
Well, talk –
Why do the poems in your style
So often form, of crap, a pile?
We balk
At ‘crack’ as drug, or woman’s part,
With dreams of giving life to art,
You dork!
‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ – oh, please!
That ****-free quote is as is cheese
To chalk
Compared with Danny, who’s ‘oh … Kaye’,
And Allen, in a ‘Would he’ way.

To walk
Fifth Avenue, where storm clouds ****
The countryside with ticker-tape …
Pop cork?
‘Bronx hill new moan here’ was the cause;
But Central Park is where to pause
For torque
As that’s the place you would unwind
To wrench from vagrants, that you find
May stalk;
But, anyway, your poets stink –
Their barrel, they do need, I think,
To caulk:
Your school of poets, meter log,
Like what you get in synagogue
Of pork!

This would
have
many self-styled poets
who believe that
taking
an ordinary sentence and splitting it
into random segments
is poetry
up in arms!

Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus,
who was sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on.
When he was sound asleep, he fell to the ground from the third story
and was picked up dead.     [Acts 20:9]


Ye Olympian poets, hearken well
while the fall of a tragic youth I tell.
My Lydian lay, unsung by Homer
in pastoral ages far and former
shall warn and chasten your Patrician ears
recalling bygone Hellenistic years.
Pardon the insufficient gravitas –
the intention here is not blasphemous…

Saul, since Damascus and the desert days
had progressed to his apostolic phase;
a minor Asian town, Trojan Troas
lent him their ears. What we came to know as
Western Judeo-Christianity
was birthed in near-comic humanity.
But Saint Paul was completely serious
feverishly focused, quite delirious.

And so the first story he narrated-
second, then a third story related,
foreshadowing from Moses’ law the Christ
and Gentile nations grafted in, or spliced
as shoots from a wild rebel olive tree;
the Eternal One who is Trinity…
and many other holy mysteries
he taught and unlocked with scriptural keys.
By his third story, some eyelids fluttered
the lamps burned low while his truths were uttered.
The allure of Aegean night was deep –
but he offered something greater than sleep.
Among them one languished, barely alert,
a young (very tired) Grecian convert.

Eutychus nodded, his frame lightly propped,
in the night-freshened window. He had stopped
heeding Saint Paul who was preaching Jesus…
and thus he surrendered to Morpheus.

Unfortunate, weary, his tired head nods;
still exegeting from beyond, Paul plods.
Finally, the liminal threshold reached
E. falls – to encounter the power Paul preached.
His toga billowing as he plummets
from peaks of Christological summits,
he descends to gather cryptic renown
and a dubious New Testament crown.

Was E. bored to death by St. Paul’s discourse?
Descending from grace – did he stay the course?
Was his revival a first holy fruit –
or an arrival by alternate route?
One wonders, in retrospect- was he saved?
or is this a picture of mankind, depraved
fallen in slumber, oblivious, dead
until Truth’s unkindness touches our head…
Like Lazarus, this one had to die twice
We ask: how many more deaths would suffice?
Did he talk to the Lord while departed?
Could he fathom what Jesus had started?
Like Luke’s blind man, the sin was not his own,
but that God’s power be openly shown.
For his pains: a two-fold resurrection
rebirth through Paul and divine election.
(Unless the whole thing was allegory –
mere Jewish fable or pagan story…)
Don’t censure my Lydian levity
nor discount apostolic gravity
lamenting the youth bored to death by Paul;
we discern, in Eutychus, our own fall.
Revived, he learned, before the rest of us,
the difference between Christ and Morpheus.

If there be details still to verify
or vague scenarios to modify,
we shall, in heaven, request to hear it
from the lips of Eutychus’ own spirit.
(And then we can corroborate with Paul
The how and the who and the wherewithal.)