Roots

Xanadu and Kubla Khan

water from naiads and

Danaids everywhere

nor any swap to sync

What are words worth when

lilacs bloom through dooryards into their doom,

measured out

in coffin swoons?

Few flee nor wait for free

parking, lots to be

diced for

in linen, losing to

the house always wins.

Unctuous grins

prefacing

sales pitches out of bounds,

daffodils laughing,

algorithms graphing:

…and the wind ignored the rain, blowing through it like betrayal,

horizontal, dry between the

drops

in the red shadow

of shock.

Author note: I drew image and partial sound patterns from Coleridge, Wordsworth, Whitman, Shakespeare, Cummings, and Eliot, playing with language and meter with intentional enjambment (which I have as much of a thing for as some do for end rhyme). I like to break lines to emphasize words and ideas, and I firmly believe that rhyme is most powerful internally or as an echo, rhyming with the line from the canon that I’m attempting to call to the reader’s mind. I hope it lands and succeeds.