Rosalee

Rosalee

was it my Lord of the monkey?
or some other foolhardy chap
traipsing over along his britches
to a field full of wild plovers and
sea-sand it is God's just retribution
saith he I remember it well
this is the true sea-sand

it stretches the creditableness of many
far and wide for here is folly
matrix and endives gone to pot
shamed shambling shirred showered bolt-shot
red blue tan and black gray with silver
but the clock-repairman hasn't tooled it since
watch and see the folderol decamps swiftly
it has done all its duty to the new regime

the lines are cut as pleasant spaces
brightly wandering o'er the brocade avenue
marked for consideration by the esteemed
honorificabilitudinitatibus in the lion's den
with the hears of fate all round them
mocking the diatribes of the new-found abbot
he of the lay trismegistical and melancholy-moon'd
with the barbarism of the East upon his brow
all minstrels maddening figured in his frets
the cool array of thaumaturges whipping past you

the city is a tabula rasa in its own mind
the blanks converge and meld into one mess
of mere allusion pother boy and tethered mix
you contravened the contraband you weathered all
the strain and stain the checkmating board
swept clean the god in the garden writhing
town-cried in the withers dunce and Dunsinane
while the local yokels looked and saw the time
folded like a newspaper put to abrogation

fiddlers ran the tune through the gates of dubiety
how might you say calculating the arrow's root?
where home it might strike at the feather's point
in the scale with a stone and no air here's
how it goes round with the cash on the table
and table in hand for the smash-and-grab in the street