TO MK
Meghan, don’t it seem insane,
With fifteen blocks between, we twain,
Though each is on the other’s brain
And with no let up,
Like Burnham Wood and Dunsinane,
Have never met up?
Five years ago, what made us balk
Was fifteen blocks—a nothing walk
I sometimes took, in hopes to chalk
A Meghan-sighting;
Your suitor, not the chickenhawk
Of your indicting.
I know the moeurs of this province
Demand that outraged gag-response.
But ask yourself what one first wants
Who seeks a lover:
To be wanted—a nuance
Those moeurs don’t cover.
There’s only one account that passes
When guys like me pay court to lasses:
The girl’s “harassed,” the heel “harasses,”
Who’d maintain less?
And she, what else, as green as grass, is
Wholly stainless.
Except you didn’t have to settle
For that account. You dodged the nettle:
The girl who had, back then, the mettle
To have framed it,
Reduced her part in our duet, till
She disclaimed it.
Forget how falsely you discount
Your own consent—how this account
Makes me a cooz hound, mad to mount
Some maiden booty;
Forget the poet’s holy fount,
Desire of beauty;
Forget those poems you’re making art from
Have got no planet else they start from
But your beauty—what, apart from
Sheer conventions
Could later wean your once free heart from
Its propensions?
True, the terms you framed our link in
Were all that you’d been trained to think in—
Puerilities kids these days drink in
From their mothers;
And one so raised would, once they sink in,
Have no others.
Your cohorts, too, no doubt rewarded
Your suffering all your predator did;
Your fiancé (who, talk of sordid,
Ms. Goody-goody
Two-timed me with and dumped me for) did;
What else could he?
You broke that off—the guy you pledged
Was “too controlling,” you alleged:
The nestling and the fully fledged,
Again the quarry;
Exactly how your part was hedged
In our story.
As I recall it, though, our fling
Was fought like boxers in the ring:
As round by round the bell went “Ding!”
We each still hung on—
Two counterpunchers who won’t swing
Until they’re swung on,
No more besetting than beset.
As I recall it, that duet
Was like how scorpions coquette,
When each deploys in
Full body armor, stinger wet
With deadly poison.
The one asymmetry between us
Was not “experience” and greenness.
If lame Hephaestus dares touch Venus,
She allows him;
For him, the utter unforeseenness
Of it wows him.
Talk about a broke piñata!
That handsome an inamorata
Who scorned (it seemed) the cant schemata
Kids palaver—
You getta girl like that, you gotta
Dare to have her.
It seemed. For whether buddies egged,
Or those schemata question-begged,
Or you, engagement fled from, pegged
As double-dealings
My heart’s professions—you reneged.
Well, no hard feelings:
It seems you have to first annex
To making love or having sex
Some “higher” interest—and this ex
You doubted had one:
A, what shrinks would term, “complex,”
Withal, a sad one,
Whose pathos I hear, like a catch,
In how you color each mismatch,
And how the emails you dispatch
From your computer
Try desperately to re-attach
Your quondam suitor,
Who gives you nothing in response.
So there we are—two soupirants
With fifteen stops between each wants
To cross, but falters;
Each always in the other’s sconce;
Noetic alters.
Meghan, don’t it seem insane,
With fifteen blocks between, we twain,
Though each is on the other’s brain
And with no let up,
Like Burnham Wood and Dunsinane,
Have never met up?
Five years ago, what made us balk
Was fifteen blocks—a nothing walk
I sometimes took, in hopes to chalk
A Meghan-sighting;
Your suitor, not the chickenhawk
Of your indicting.
I know the moeurs of this province
Demand that outraged gag-response.
But ask yourself what one first wants
Who seeks a lover:
To be wanted—a nuance
Those moeurs don’t cover.
There’s only one account that passes
When guys like me pay court to lasses:
The girl’s “harassed,” the heel “harasses,”
Who’d maintain less?
And she, what else, as green as grass, is
Wholly stainless.
Except you didn’t have to settle
For that account. You dodged the nettle:
The girl who had, back then, the mettle
To have framed it,
Reduced her part in our duet, till
She disclaimed it.
Forget how falsely you discount
Your own consent—how this account
Makes me a cooz hound, mad to mount
Some maiden booty;
Forget the poet’s holy fount,
Desire of beauty;
Forget those poems you’re making art from
Have got no planet else they start from
But your beauty—what, apart from
Sheer conventions
Could later wean your once free heart from
Its propensions?
True, the terms you framed our link in
Were all that you’d been trained to think in—
Puerilities kids these days drink in
From their mothers;
And one so raised would, once they sink in,
Have no others.
Your cohorts, too, no doubt rewarded
Your suffering all your predator did;
Your fiancé (who, talk of sordid,
Ms. Goody-goody
Two-timed me with and dumped me for) did;
What else could he?
You broke that off—the guy you pledged
Was “too controlling,” you alleged:
The nestling and the fully fledged,
Again the quarry;
Exactly how your part was hedged
In our story.
As I recall it, though, our fling
Was fought like boxers in the ring:
As round by round the bell went “Ding!”
We each still hung on—
Two counterpunchers who won’t swing
Until they’re swung on,
No more besetting than beset.
As I recall it, that duet
Was like how scorpions coquette,
When each deploys in
Full body armor, stinger wet
With deadly poison.
The one asymmetry between us
Was not “experience” and greenness.
If lame Hephaestus dares touch Venus,
She allows him;
For him, the utter unforeseenness
Of it wows him.
Talk about a broke piñata!
That handsome an inamorata
Who scorned (it seemed) the cant schemata
Kids palaver—
You getta girl like that, you gotta
Dare to have her.
It seemed. For whether buddies egged,
Or those schemata question-begged,
Or you, engagement fled from, pegged
As double-dealings
My heart’s professions—you reneged.
Well, no hard feelings:
It seems you have to first annex
To making love or having sex
Some “higher” interest—and this ex
You doubted had one:
A, what shrinks would term, “complex,”
Withal, a sad one,
Whose pathos I hear, like a catch,
In how you color each mismatch,
And how the emails you dispatch
From your computer
Try desperately to re-attach
Your quondam suitor,
Who gives you nothing in response.
So there we are—two soupirants
With fifteen stops between each wants
To cross, but falters;
Each always in the other’s sconce;
Noetic alters.
