Pre-Modern Prosody

PRE-MODERN PROSODY

By JC STREET © 2005 050202

Some days I go down to the corner and hold up a sign that says “THE PERSONAL PRONOUN IS DEAD”

Elsewhere it’s the subjunctive mood I mourn and adverbs, of which I knew formerly, bring a maudlin tear at times. I lie down while others lay and I could NOT care less.

The magpies are wooing each other in skimpy grass skirts. This is their idea of kewl. They sidle up to each other and say things like “Hi sailor – just get paid?” and then simper fetchingly. Eventually they fly away and steal things.

I dreamed I was lying in the long grass of a hayfield spying on the twins; “the reason is” and “because”. I tried to find some distinguishing feature that would characterize one from the other but, they were identical. They were never found apart but always dated in pairs.

In deep winter the sidewalk snowplows in Kingston, Ontario mistake the sidewalk and scrape a path across the feet of residential lawns. Come Spring, when the grass needs cutting, they are nowhere to be found.

The videotape industry has determined that, in North America, the opening for the tape shall be at the bottom of the box. Thus, when the box is picked up for perusal the tape is found to be chipped or shattered at one’s feet . . . or, implicated as a homicide weapon if one has been leaning on a 19th floor balcony rail when picking up the box off a wicker occasional table . . . and seen the tape pirouette through about 200 feet of air at 32 feet per second per second . . . before striking a citizen of the Republic.

We had brought up the children to play at throwing circles, but soon found them hurling squares and triangles in defiance of their birthright. One particularly rebellious child was jailed for hurling a rhombus into a Venn diagram.

The telephone forbids me to reach out and touch someone until I have played back all my old voice messages. Some of them have become quite moldy. Others trigger a sense of morbid gloom which is ill-relieved by selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors.

I shamelessly download e-books by lubricious authors with apparent external impunity. However, guilt seethes inside although I rationalize that I would gladly make them a mug of freeze-dried coffee if they dropped by.

. . . and I have some vacuum-packed cookies walled up in the basement for after the war.

The diner was preparing to launch so we finished our coffee hurriedly as a waitress wearing nothing but an apron and step-ins ushered us out. We watched from a safe distance as a disembodied voice advised “we have liftoff”.

We had heard the same slogan, uttered not without a certain hubris, in the changing room of a shop specializing in stilettos for cross-dressing metrosexuals.

The desert shimmered with pink smoke and as the diner rose we observed several hotdogs hurtle to earth.