The past the serial songsing and suddenly
The neutrino cloudburst that replenishes
The blasted heath with its geezer
Sedate under starry welkin
For pastoral Chloris and her beau
That refocuses without clemency or pause
The annoying claw absences mostly
Deflations and skurs in what you would expect
Redox reactions that never look back
Predictions and topographical broadsides
The great wheel that opens the ceiling
To the lethal and lifegiving lightning promethean apparatus
That drags at length its slow length along
A road where potholes are repaired and later repaired again
But still the trickling rivulet scampers along
With its purling innuendos
Adverbs and punctuation straight out of commas
Though no tears hung and certainly none fell
The keynote speaker haltingly waxed all non-fiction prosy
And shared her struggle with the celebrated 12-step program
With a family member she suspected of neurodivergence
With the attention paid to idiom at the expense of genre
And darkly with an incarceration that she strongly hinted
Had been a miscarriage
My struggle has been immense she noted keywise
You can’t erase the blooming conventional wisdom
The reckless punditry the scar
School supplies and candy faced with fentanyl
And how many have enlisted in this influential mission
Well you probably can but probably shouldn’t
And don’t claim you don’t know any better
You’ve read the news today O boy
As promulgated in the obsequious jugs and jars
In the barbershop and the church in the wildwood
And God help us all
Do you feel lucky punk
In the pulsating blue wave
Seen for the first time in a unique aerial view
The herky-jerky plather blue jeans and table cloths
Of the top 40 the bottom 40 and the medium 102
And the big new rebooted Utilitarian Monster with bold new aggressive styling
Represents an historic milestone in rugged non sequitur
Frozen TV dinners for cats and dogs
Because nobody dresses up or sends postcards any more
That’s not how I was raised screamed the legislator
You never were raised counterscreamed the kid behind the counter
Apparelled in the jerkin of a squire
The youth can’t pay attention for 30 seconds running
But they do get in some good zingers
And then there’s the cadre of sentimental fools
Who can’t or won’t let go the garlands
Of colony class and church
The harlot with a heart of gold
The melancholy Dane
The resourceful castaway
The children who escape with derring-do
The suicide adultress
The poor but honest plowboy later to become a hero in the war
As visible in our unique aerial perspective
A six-year old appearing at Walmart in his tee-ball uniform and spikes
The portrait bluing with age of a bespectacled girl
Studious in saddle oxfords and plaid skirt
Next to that of a handsome sweatered couple and their labradoodle
Proficient in the outdoorsy shibboleth
And here is fruit and bread and seven kinds of cheese
And a toddler who builds a metropolis of Duplos
And an old woman stumped at how to dispose of a lifetime of books
And a child working her fingers around the neck of a guitar
And a guy in his 40s trying to rebuild
After a decade and a half in the sales force
And a high school kid soon to graduate
Fussing over the documentation
Worried that the extra-currics might not suffice
Not quite sure how to annotate some of the categories
And the autobiographical narrative fuggetabout
Vaguely familiar with hideous ruin and combustion
And what of the naked mole rats
Who can’t get no satisfaction
Their penile form and subterranean habit
Spending their darkling lives down there
Seeking out the lush labia by their aroma
Among the roots and rhizomes and geological paraphernalia
We need more data you can hear them cry
Ask your doctor if it’s right for you
From your unique aerial vantage
And when you finally clamp down on terra firma
Do us all a big favor
Amble down beside the limpid pool and all its sweets
Where Laura lingered
Whisper to the maid amid her lambs
That the world has changed
That the earth has undergone
A revolution