Nah nah don’t speak to me of perfection
Perfection’s not a thing
The Ode to a Nightingale isn’t perfect
If it were it would be a total failure
Instead of the glorious triumph that it is
These faults that anyone can find
These Homer Nods
Invite our appreciation
Not our censure
Necessary for the new stage
In the new theater
On the terrible new riverbank
That is every poem

What would you
Autocorrect the seizure that announces the shaman’s enlightenment
Subtract from the burden that each one bears alone
Before the multitudinous sea of people and other things
Making the red one green
Autotune the cry of mourning for unappeasable loss
Edit the song of the mockingbird

But what about striving aspiration lust ambition
Leonardo’s ornithopter
Earhart’s media-driven quest
One small step for man
Don’t we have a duty to uplift
Sure we have duties
But what kind of uplift do you mean
The moral or the mood
Support for insensible passion
Command for affirmation
But affirmation of what

Good must be good enough
When everybody tries
Must try to cobble a platform
Not to be seen but to see
To gaze across the whole miserable affair
The stilts are too flimsy
And the edifices already extant
Rising on every hand
Conceal more than they expose
The foul rags and bones in the charnel house
Turn from your autoanatomizing
And seek the holy wicked involuted world