Defeat in Battle
……….
True beauty is allowed to lapse to make
Some room for what is novel, just the new,
As if by definition modish ache
Is better than the perfect pain. This skew
Along to holiness of fashion runs
The flopping risk of dribbles from the lips,
And gives us slobbered verse and paintings, sons
Of Pollock, derivative cummings. Hips
In Phidias, Canova, Jason in
Thorvaldsen, these precisions aren’t enough.
We have to move to ugliness’s sin,
Slurs rhyming with blobs and all such stuff.
..My friend wrote H-bomb splendor but then turned
….To tinkering stanzas. Opulence adjourned.