Manifesto

I'd love for my poems to be graceful and long-legged
Like how Sylvia or Byron or Zeph might have said it,
Straddling conventional wordsmithery,
A wizard of lyrical alchemy.
But I don't just want to stand on the shoulder of giants, fuck compliance!
I wanna stride over metaphors, slide over similes, enfranchise
enjambment.
Pour milky vowels into a bowl of crunchy consonants
(I'll have one from the top please, Carol)
and douse it all in alphabetti spaghetti.
Thinking outside the epistemological box?
What bloody box?
I want you to dance across the page,
Eloquent acrobatics and wordy somersaults
As I keep the Beat.
I've got a lot of time for those geezers,
The academical crowd-pleasers
Who put the best words in the best order,
But I've only got one voice,
and this is how it manifests itself.
Yes! I wanna permeate fickle ears
Yes! I wanna resonate past my expiration and into years beyond my existence.
But there's a perverse masochist stoically nestling inside of me
That wants my progeny to see
That a Paper Tiger cannot bite you.
You've got two ears
So I know you can hear,
But are you listening?