20/02/2018
Apollonics
1
V2
Flare-haired shell of morning, hail!
whose siren sighs
cannot be heard on Earth
unless by Hermes whispered kiss
or by the Moon's cocked ear.
Does Apollo know the hour
that you within your bower
blue and white will be? Does he
who makes the night and breaks the day
and white will be,
does he rule thee?
2
Krow
Once the Crow was white
as forsworn sins, only eyes
of blowfly blue, like bottle-
flies that grew
from Lazarus’s skin.
Now he sports a
grave-black jacket, woven
from the colours of the night.
What had caused his coat to fleck?
What scorched his pipes?
Why croak his current kah?
Apollo’s green-eyed glance alone would char.
3
Belepheron On Logos
Give to me just world enough, and time -
(or monkeys typing at prodigious speed) -
I'd coin an Apollonic lyric, rhymed
to rival songs of Thalia, or Schiller's Lied.
With Dionysus barside, pulling draughts,
bridled Pegasus and Hercules, to
pull me through my Sisyphean tasks;
with these about me, I'd soon set to!
Afflatus of sublime conceit,
thesaurus at my side; their book of rhyme;
macaronic dictionary;
al dente penne; cauldron of larks' chyme -
this admixture, this stoup
of suitably Euphrosyne sound -
rounds of couplets, bracing loop-
de-loops - if graced by Aglaia spellbound
would do to call logomachies unmatched!
- should Nemesis indite the scheme I've hatched,
the sentence will my hubris flatter:
my escape from Nowhere is no matter!
But notwithstanding all of this, the ploy
that I decline to make amounts to this:
I just will not, once and for all, all joy
all poetry define. I will insist,
just let it be, and all appeals to pride
and magistry resist. So presently,
I scheme to leave unhatched, lines but barely
latched together, stuck on bits Whatever
