Friday, January 17, 2020

THE REJECT PILE

Tasteful poems
are obviously not these
trifling, day-to-day

things you've been writing;
at most, they're the
once-a-week, Sunday-

best variety—
forged from the clearest
crystalline nouns

each one mined slavishly
from a dark
participial tunnel

and adorned
with the finest
custom adjectival inlays

which gleam
with a rare heavenly
adverbial filigree—

all of which
are then delicately suspended
along precision-length chains

of dangling
prepositional phrases
like beads

along the latticed length
of a flawlessly perfect
symbolical circle.

These are priceless
Tiffany necklaces we're
talking about here—not your

church basement
crates full
of plastic topaz rosaries.