Rhymes with Schenectady

Every fifteen days or so, one ought to write another Manifesto.
I've been lax: I don't think I've hatched one since before I paid
my taxes (money going out distracts). But here I am surrounded
by the slick unnerving quivering abominably slippery detritus
of too many poets Allen Ginsberg tells me I should read! I'm sick
of Corso, Kerouac and Catullus: I’d like to sic on them a battle-axe:
stick them in a poisoned little cottage in St. Mary Mead, and let

Miss Marple drive them mad as she perseverates exactly how
and why they bleed so awfully much all over everything. Severing
myself from all their urgent diction, I protest that I’ve enough
inside my magic chest to entertain without resorting to their
egoistic fictions. Oh, I guess they're not so bad – not, anyway,
much worse than anyone one meets, the homeless clueless
hopeless beaten prophylactic walking tactics we call personalities –

let’s cut ‘em all some slack. It’s tough to get up, go, come back. But
here’s the deal. Today I say that if we are to get a leg up, we have
got to penetrate the cosmos like a flying fist, make lists of aspirations
into something more than listless wisps: alchemize the stale into
the fresh: make flesh from a synecdoche (rhymes with Schenectady)
indicating genus by referring to one telling part of it – ramming all
the universe into a quark: seeking macrocosm in the micro without

going too completely psycho – prize precisely what a poem is.
(Extra fizz: I remember, in Schenectady, one terribly late night when
I was just one month the younger side of twenty, I took in the whole
bejeezus of what I would spend the rest of life recovering from:
a synecdoche of softly moonlit skin: taut arms and back of somebody
called Jim. I never dared to touch, but it is not too much to say
that everything that I would ever want resided in this glimpse of him.)

Guy Kettelhack