Somatic cells insist upon action
From systems afar remote
One way to conceptualize
The advent of hunger horniness or pain
The interval of a wistful minor second shifts downward
Its customary position atop the tetrachord
A young celebrated artist Billie Eileish say or Janelle Monáe
Adorned with a harlequin mask and wooden toy sword
Relinquishes from time to time the customary popular tone
To adopt a more declamatory style fit to evoke a heroic age
So shaken as we are so wan with care
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
Rebel and usurper Henry would-be military dictator
Constantly harried as such guys are
By others who would rebel and usurp
Never really spoke like this
Nobody spontaneously erupts in blank verse
Certainly not verse of such exquisite precision
Such tender flexibility
Wordsworth’s proclamations to the contrary notwithstanding
Memory is an act of artifice
A reconstruction of a reconstruction ad infinitum
And by nature art must have its materials
Travel far enough or merely long enough
Even in some desultory Brownian motion
And you will reach the indistinguishable frontier
A concept not a feature
That famous dangerous liminal state
More situation than state
More inclination than situation
That seemingly voluntary semitone
Despite the raging of the mob
Who deny the obvious fact that there are limits
Though granted limits often consist of looming or covert indistinctness
Does Henry sincerely express his exhaustion and fear
Or does he cynically employ rhetoric as an instrument of use
Warfare by other means sub rosa tactics of command and control
The wonder of drama that never explains
He expresses the truth perhaps without knowing it
His sadness his depletion no doubt his feeling of guilt
And what does a fictional character know
Albeit a character drawn from history
And declamation has fallen from favor as fakey rant
But how else to manifest reality but in fakes and fictions
The made-up marvelry of wist and word
Reality that is that transcends the outward and the in
An assailant on high can effect much harm
As can boots on the ground
As can a virus invading an unready immune system
But woe to the innocent predator that does not feed its young
And wrath is squandered against the tremblor and the whirlwind
And woe to the traveler engrossed in a podcast
Who approaches at speed the pileup on the foggy interstate
Who never intended an inattentiveness
But hear the keening of the pipes
Witness the weeping of the hero
Who at last has acknowledged the truth
That he could do no other
The best of intentions or the worst
The sad song that tells the world
Amid all this one great woe
All this insuperable ignorance
All this implacable need
That somebody understands