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Happy New Year Post

In which I invent the term Fractured homophone.

This two stanza poem, by me, "Ode to Bookstore and Dinner Out, in Spring," is a fractured homophone of the two final stanzas of Keats' majestic "Ode to Autumn."   Ode to Bookstore and Dinner Out, in Spring   The author haunts inside the stone store, brick and mortar. I look for her to find, caressing pages on a beige/blue carpet floor,   her soft hair lifted by no window but by the wind of a door revolving.  Others are found asleep,   drowsy in fumes of coffee, as piped songs hook     like twilight shadows of twin-stalked flowers crook an urban elder.  Old New Yorker.  A gleaner keeps  re-shelving.  Kids returning.  Laden cart, each book confected by a press, with painted look,     pimps my loyal roost. Each someone’s child. You’d think I rooster, hour by hour, but I run.   Here is hungry Spring. When are harvest days? Don’t think of them, we have our corner diner too. Above dinner, tight clouds vice to a shatter or a fake. No way in this wet season to not begin to be. “See, son, rivers, Hudson, Seine, Tigris, mourn   that human fish who hopes moss only grows north.”     Over-thinking our clues to what lives or dies is frowned on by my cool-bodied gulls just born.       Idol contestants sing; and now with treble soft   your waitress whistles at a sketch of Lara Croft,     as, outside, bluebirds dive bomb from the skies. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;	15
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;	20
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day	25
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;	30
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Court Street Red

Pictorial incantation, December 2009

Court Street Red

Stopped in dread

Court Street Green

Freedom dream

(repeat)