Introduced in a time of coarser idioms,
his edicts were an insult to his age.
The copyists plotted how to get rid of them
while attending to how they looked upon the page.
He stuck to his own proscriptions all day
as if each were the last in a series of lives,
all the while wondering how much he’d have to pay
to be relieved of going through them twice.
Were life to be lived once more, what else would he do?
Don’t go spending half of your life as you make ends
meet propagating strictures and taboos
which nature and art will soon place in abeyance.
But be sure you don’t take, as you walk through your poem,
the only path that doesn’t lead to Rome:
the one that cuts through the middle of the cadence.
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