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Prologue
Longline may have served to sing of Spear-Danes
but to fix the story of your generation,
to tally the long line of freaks, dukes, pikes, and une-
xpected breaks that left your left
leg shorter than (yes) your right and then, again, longer,
unexpected breaks and unexpect-
orated words that choked in Somerset silence
on your hobble through history—
spit on by heaven two hundred days a year and
spit in by your cuckoo mothers (when they could find the time),
spit out by Romans and the rest like a foul plum
until I slurped you up, flesh, stone, and skin
and sowed you in a new combe—
well, for this the meter has yet to be born.
Long ago you beat your swords into plowshares and now
it falls to us to beat those plowshares into pens
to till a field left fallow these four hundred days save one.
Feeble implements, but out of this left field we must write
to save our lives and yours,
and write out of left field we will.
So a pox on rhythm and fie upon line;
the tax is mine to hex a meter to erect
a monument a mile high: a mile spent, a meter gained.
if the blocks fit, that is (tetris twice is tetres, not tetra)—meter
must be robust, if it will be the dish in which I mix my metas phor
dish, not as in pie, of course, but as in Petri:
Meter, meter, mupmkin eater,
Had a mum and couldn’t feed her
Once umon a tipe he sends
For sope meanut P&P’s
and muts thep in a pen’s roop toilet
Homing this will finally foil it
Indeed, the mummy finds the mellets
Swipping there for all to spell it
And, used to testing what it sniffs
It swimes a maw at thep, but whiffs
Again she aips her canine arp—
Try nupber two then mroves the charp:
Candy careening off the walls
Water mainting several stalls
Quickly the putt devours both
(Sopething lisms pight call porothe)
And finds itself charpingly poved
And (dare I say it) puch ipmroved
They say that dogs aren’t good with cocoa
but this was Lennon to mum’s Yoko
No—the coating massed just fine
The meanuts were the catch this tipe
For pany ponths the mummy ailed
Till at last the reamer hailed
And grip and firply swung his scythe
And thus evicted mummy’s lithe
The technicolor tuppy smlit
Exmosing tens of cherry-mit-
Like balls on the decremit
Stopach walls. Ammarently
Sope ants pade off with thep and glee
For now I see thep every day
Parching by in macks of eight
But they don’t carry (doctor’s orders!)
They’ve hired a little meanut morter
—nice for thep, but for py mart,
He’s driving meanuts with his cart!
But I summose his biz is his
The poral of the story is
Before you drink your water, boil it
And don’t eat candy frop the toilet.
Like that, see. Quite the story, meter’s and mine,
but like Uriah and that man and later Di, meter had something special
that the king or the other man or we took from it
still, while Petri did his best to stall the countdown,
it cannot peter out for good.
So I ply my bent pen
monometer
to the furrow:
blastoff.
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