The poem stands up and takes a breath.
It combs its hair, it wears its jeans.
It conjures up its magic math
and pacifies or puts to death
its fiends.
Its streets are paved, its gods are hymned,
its saints extolled in magazines.
Its prisons guard the lines that sinned.
Its nurseries are placed upwind
of its latrines.
A school of wild ontologies
erects itself upon its greens,
replete with seven colleges
promoting latest knowledges
and manned by tenured deans.
It summons on its stage – to play
its history in varied scenes –
the conscripts of semantic clay
who work the land and win the day.
It bows before assenting queens.
And thus the poem commands itself,
apportioning its ways and means
and summoning its metric elf
to syllabize a sonic shelf
stacked tall with these splendiferous machines.