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)
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