Gay men capable of true gaiety
The steady-eyed spinster active in her milieu
Denizens of the demimonde who could take poetry or leave it
Wives of high-cultural celebrities
Phlebotomists and augurers of the sphygmomanometer
Workers in the convenience stores the warehouses and the fast-food restaurants
Decadent aristocrats
Heroes of social justice feckless dilettantes and scions of great families
Hipsters in their implausible garb
Gray drudges with a secret passion
Outsiders of problematic mental health
Neurodiverse entertainers who dwell in the ambiguity of gender
Executives of going concerns
Magistrates generals technicians attorneys obstetricians
Teenagers boisterous or withdrawn
Prodigious children who lisp in numbers
Rude mechanics and effete aesthetes
Sighing maidens born to blush unseen
Dowdy dour professors solemnly chanting through their pointed beards

What are we after here
Statements expositions analyses accounts
Songs laments jubilations libretti dirges cries of the heart
Architectonic verbal edifices spontaneous overflows
Sonnets villanelles heroic couplets blank verse
Ballads spenserians pindarics or poems in prose
Massive narratives in ottava or terza rima
Notes queries arguments
Limericks tongue twisters jokes puns and acrostics
Metaphysical conceits
Scurrilous attacks
Obscene broadsides
Minute renderings of the smallest and most remote county
Intrepid evocations of cosmic immensity
Arimanes seated on a globe of fire
A sparrow pecking at the gravel
Sweet serenades to ripening love
Sour cocktails compounded of ennui
Salty chanties of ribald fancy
Bitter denunciations of vice and folly
The lubricious umami of vowels fricatives nasals plosives and stops
The just representation of general life
The egotistical sublime
A thing of beauty and a joy forever

The forest primeval the Spanish Steps
The sounds smells and pace of the city
The field where man follows the plow
The field where woman binds the sheaves
The shop with its gear tackle and trim of all trades
The wandering clouds the looming mountains the restless seas
The leafy branch whereon the songbird sings
The soft earth wherethrough the tender flower peeps
The slender skyward fingers of trees in winter
The great bridges towers spires blockhouses roundhouses and vehicle assembly buildings
The wagons ships aircraft freight trains cars nuclear-powered submarines and oxcarts jogging on pneumatic tires
The virtual spaces defined by distance-obliterating media of transmission and reception
The hutches stalls and kennels of our brute companions equine canine or feline
The homes for the aged in their wisdom and cognitive decline
The church the school the place of business
The field of contention and the refuge of peace
The daycare redolent of paste finger paints and infantile effluence
The equivocal resorts of rage lust and melancholy
The granular details
The abstruse speculations
The daunting search through the universal library

Human persons treat of these subjects these places
Who have occupied some place of their own
Gelatinous organisms with the gift of speech
No different from anybody else
And everybody is different
All perforce take action in the world
And some shoulder the doom of squaring the circle
That is
Of wording the truth
Valorous endeavor
But is the particular compulsion
To cry to expose to disclose to overflow
Worthy of particular attention
It is not
For we must regard the issue and not the issuance as the matter prime
The progeny and not the gestation
The poem and not the poet
The life is not the thing
Except insofar as it looses the latch
To open the gate
To set out on the excursion
In the realms of immortality