Nouvelle poeme

Names Suppressed to Protect the Innocent (May 20, 2011)

Z. was actually a character in a story, a novel, a narrative,
maybe a movie, a film, a cinematic adventure, perhaps
a drama, a stage play, a live spoken theatre production.
Z. (the fictional personage) suffered a terrible compulsion:
to utter the obvious, to speak the unadulterated truth,
to shout the king has no clothes, to say the queen is a loon,
the singer’s lost his nose, the neighbor belongs in a bin,
the colleague’s struck a pose with no rational backing,
the hostess has skin disease plural, while her daughter
is in kin straits, for she’ll do anything to please the court
of public opinion or of her lone son, since he’s addicted,
to rhyme and reason and witless appeals to lost and
last letters.

Lyric Little

Well before my unrequested transfer to this particular lovely outpost,
I was fully aware of the meanings of distance and gin joint,
a place of business vending spirits, often clear and distilled versions.
Now I hear it's become risky to rear one's gentle head
in salons of genteel brutes, in places of odd commerce.
The roots of cognizance can be tricky.