31 August 2006

Toward a Surfeit of Pretentiousness

Ode to Mohair Lace a Stockinette Hat

(In free verse. Very free.)

Erudition and pedantry
Are my vocation.
Normally,
I revel in my
Misanthropic calling.

But just now,
While I dissertate,
The importunate demands
Of my supercilious professors
Fill me with ennui.



Why stultify my mind
With turgid prose
And pallid, jejeune thoughts?
Why cower beneath the lambaste,
Nay, the fusilade of obdurate censures
From my serried colleagues?

Why supplicate, vapidly,
Why clothe myself in contrition
And obsequiousness
Before the tawdry miasma
That is
The academy?

When I could knit mohair lace,
When I could
Bewail my fate and
Bemoan the fetters of my penury,
While watching each sumptuous row
of lace grow and grow?

But wait!
What befalls me here?
A chasm! A morass!
A gnarled, distended freak of echinated string!
It will not be riven, it will not schism.
It is trenchant, it is ossified --
It is vile, turpitudinous string!



I wrest myself away --
I seek repose from this new torment --
My peripatetic heart
Finds refuge
In wool, in stockinette
Quotidian, motile -- nubile --
Wool.

No more mohair
Today.
My inchoate zeal
Is now reserved
for my simple, pretty,
Red hat.

2 comments:

Laura said...

I like. Both the poem and the hat. :)

Hannah said...

Ooh, catchy!