The House of Words

Italic Timber or “The House of Words”

for Pete. Happy Birthday!

.............

There once was a man who wrote “ I can!”

He put out the clarion call

One thousand poems

Other people’s knowings

He vowed to collect them all

They wrote and wrote

And he built a boat

That sailed on a syntax sea

With apostrophe oars

And grammatical doors

And a mast from a capital T

He rowed away, one paragraph day

On a hope and a lower case prayer

But the leaks in the ink made the poem boat sink

The dream vanished into thin rhyme air

But he wouldn’t bow down

So he rode around town

In a lyrical megaphone van

He demanded verse

The maritime curse sowed the seed of a new grand plan

With enough good rhyme

And years in time

He knocked up a tongue-tied house

With assonance eaves

And a garden full of leaves

And a pet metaphorical mouse

This was no hovel

It was built like a novel

With autobiographical glass

And the sign on the fence read

“Beware Of The Tense! Herein No Plagiarists Pass!”

He liked nothing better than a capital letter

In a tree full of alphabet birds

His home kept growing

With each new poem

He lived in a house of words

(copyright)