ARS POETICA
1. On Horace:
He does what he likes, puts you face down
caressing the mud, shoves rage into iambs.
He takes you there nerve naked, nasty,
always alive, bending you with his morning flute,
or stops you with his simple reed.
Like other gypsies he has learned to read you,
a chorus performance accustomed to smut.
His reality in tune with the world,
you swallow him like a god,
Olympic dust aglow inside you.
He empties out the lands saved up by Jupiter.
A crazed man, he will praise your endurance
and take you where a breath and four seconds of life
are kept in his magic bottle.
You live there in dangerous worship
naked with lions til beauty fades.
2. On Pope:
He raises all your vain pursuits
above the highest human standard.
Fancy's maze directs the caffeine troll
to follow your soul into melancholy hell,
or wage an epic war on a velvet plain.
He rids his garden of vulgar taste
and weeds you from his Augustan age.
Where sylphs dissolve in mist and flutter
upon your shrouded ship
the lights of eyes and silverware slip in their tides.
Authors partial to his wit
will drag you into Button's shop.
The seeds of judgment hover
where the art of sinking into scandal sheets
prepares a nation's cultural defeat.
Too ill for boyhood sport,
he thumbs his way thru Rosicrucian lore
and strands you in a private world
created for his grand aversion,
loving you and hating all your kind.
To err is only human,
to forgive him, something divine.
3. On Rollins:
He relives things in a private place,
takes your organs to replace dead ones.
Death gives him fewer choices,
doing all he can to kill you
with infection and diseased shadows.
His beloved is sleeping inside you or himself,
her breath heaves beneath your navel,
her smooth kisses caress
the inside of your thoughts,
attention is averted by writhing.
He can be leather when touched,
while your words hover in a dead spot
and makes love to a copy of you
that you left rolled up in a bus station.
Your eyes are blue planets reading of your murder.
You take the news all too well
like a wire tapper of muses.
He leaves you stunned and goes to some desert
where no such thing could happen again,
tired, angry, distant, thunderous.
What ever is left of you,
no longer belongs to him.
4. Conclusion: The Poet
He is a dance the eyes perform
when a giant leap comes true,
a fragile Virgil on a back porch
against the cold, dark blue sky,
