Prometheus Disappointed; or, As You Want It (A Quaternion)
after Anne Bradstreet
“The worst fault that poetry can commit is to be dull…”
— T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism
I.
Dunce-dense Prometheus, when the fire
Was handed off, expected to swell
Like a flimsy seawall in a gale,
But nobody boned by the first bonfire.
Since boredom’s boreal, and the bedroom’s
Freedom soon reddens the mental fire
That fantasies are heated by,
The Titan assumed that man like gods
Would be. But promiscuity slept
With a tithonia. Lover boys
And flirty echoes chose to fire
Up their insides with someone else’s
Inside scoop. His beheaded mood
Made Zeus’s eagle cry. Gomorrah
Had four or five harlots worthy of
What we read by or feed to a fire.
II.
Did prude-proud and shrewdness fornicate
With gusto and each other from time
To time? Indeed, they did! But always
Shrouded and never quite as much
As forethought imagined. Peaches piqued
The peaking pinks that fornicate
Today with autumn’s light. But the Titan
Anticipated more titillating
Storms than ours; rooftops ripped more often
From off a place that did conceal
Too well what’s called a ‘fornicate-
A-thon’ or ‘dipsy-do-rama’ by
Anyone less useless than Ulysses.
Life’s more titanic than it’s tantric,
Unless one believes those canticles
That only live to fornicate.
III.
Manual labor’s not the foreplay
Prometheus had in mind. He figured
Flickering would make a single point
Of light seem too finger-licking good
To not obnubilate it. The moon
Has no fire to give; it startles foreplay
And, like a poem, leaves men with ears
Dilated. But seduction’s strange hand
Didn’t steal Bathsheba, nor did it
The Sabine women by cracking sonnets.
(An effectively cracked sonnet’s foreplay
In the criminal mouth of Don Juan’s
Sexual rival or every god
With a baby’s beard. My forehead’s hot—
I forgot that heat’s theatrical. Death
Shrewdly foreshadowed kicks off all foreplay.)
IV.
Let’s read between the dimples and free
The kitchens from our triumphant sketches.
For every husband and cocksure wife
Can tell you that everything between
The promethean temples is manmade.
When something’s free—enormously free—
Its shadow’s soul will turn hot and green
And its shipping container dissolve.
Of a syntactical hyacinth
That’s cyan to the nth degree,
They’ll say that the verse ought to be free:
“There’s no disgrace in shagging a dishrag,
But this poem’s clothes in unattractive
Four-letter words are clothed. Just imagine
Yoga and osculations for three!”
Hercules set one art-lover free.