Verse. It’s all I’m able to write lately and it’s saving my ass, my sanity, as annus horribilis 2020 barrels on, though I can identify with poet Alice Oswald in the New Yorker article, Streaming Device. “…she defined her art as a form of dissidence. ‘I think it’s often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort,’ she wrote, ‘but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don’t mean that it is either leftwing or rightwing, but that it works at the roots of thinking.’ I know I depend on poetry to incite.

BIG SMOKE CREATION

As un-germinating or misproducing
As the city may be,
I dazzle myself,
Compose in a tweedy, eyeletted coat,

Follow insectian leads;
Gut-slide à la caterpillar,
Dig earwig-deep into a yellow rose,
Bee-imbibe hummingbird nectar.

By day I am girded
By a kaleidoscope of plumage,
By night bathe in coconut milk
In a most nonepicurean way.

With the power to prepave the future,
I eschew crapulence,
Pantomime to the blind
Despite my tiny apartment window.