Sign on Tenth Street Northwest, Oklahoma City

SIGN ON TENTH STREET NORTHWEST, OKLAHOMA CITY

     Remanufactured

     Semi-Hermetic

     Compressor

I don’t write poetry anymore because

nobody can conjure up Apollo as good as Milton,

or steal his material like the Old Possum,

and you know how it feels to have wings on your heels,

and anyway the true barbaric yawp is

melanosomes groaning in white chains,

spiral arterioles gushing lunations.

I laid out words like Scrabble® tiles in syzygy.

I laid out words like mosaics,

like I thought God wanted them laid out,

I laid out words in my heart,

my pacemaker the

     Remanufactured

     Semi-Hermetic

     Compressor

and anyway I read in a book

about how to write Dead White European Male poems

that poems about poetry

suck.