Chrono/meter Chronicled (New) by JKD

After Writers' Almanac* radio post Feb 21st 2008

Stop all of the clocks, he said, she said, they were, yes, obscenely educated,
Cut off the telephone, to be able to hear the head, the self. Then, we write
To taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospection, she wrote. It’s like
Preventing the dog from barking, the cake from baking, the street she lived on
Referred to not by numbers but by the name of her corporate sponsor—
Fiction is. Dancing, with a juicy bone, out by the dog house
With the house howling and the scraggly mutt covering its floppy ears
Is foregoing what it is to be a human being, to be virtual, above all,
The human, resonating in the silence of the pianos, bound
With muffled drum? As Auden once said, "Words so excite me”
As per example now, the stairs and the marble and the city horns
Trumpeting their past golden forward as from Invalides where
Nin peeks up from her cradle in Neuilly to spot Miller in the 18th.
To hate any language that is not as enticing as that pornographic story,
The first one, slipped under the covers, for example, to excite you
As much as rhymed couplets in iambic verse once did, ballsy writing,
Can you do something about this, she said, is my situation reparable? Meanwhile
He said “Language excites me sexually more than any living person can”
Turn in the grey matter for some pink flesh and a violin, a lyre, a poet
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come in before anything else, ie:
A person is who is passionately in love with language. O never say that I was false
Or rarely spotted at the bar, or barely sleeping near the grate
Scratch, scrape our way in, you, she and he, out to the light, my nature
To leave for nothing, to never believe all the frailties that besiege this line
It is as if, after the fact, in the rumpled bed, the papyrus rolls were all left
So preposterously. To be stained by a sum of good words, and bedraggled wines.

*NOTE: After Writers’ Almanac from American Public Radio’s Poetry Foundation Program, read by Garrison Keillor. This passage uses snippets from William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 108”, & WH Auden’s "Funeral Blues", as well as bio notes & spliced up & rearranged quotes by Auden, Anais Nin, & David Foster Wallace.