Peripetetic

Burden the cathartic
with metrics measured
in lawyerly rubrics.
The checkbox
ticks. Your future self felt
helpless with the swag bag
full of snacks & you were
famished, fiending
for the inner critic
to join choruses chortling
during anagnorisis, trite rites
faddishly reenacted in the
dwindling. Strophe
to antistrophe,
watershed to loggerheads,
we’d been glib,
disproportionate,
patronized by actuaries
for failing to
incorporate. They expropriate
our drolleries, audit our epodes
into eulogies of deference
& behest.

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