First Metric Musings:: From Bad to Verse

By Frank De Canio

Frank’s poems are presented to the reader like a bouquet of flowers of various hues and breeds. Some exude the fragrance of roses, and others conjure up thistles. They were planted in the soil of youth and watered with the trials of early adulthood, where they were plucked out of the pages of the earth after enduring storm and stress. Some are as prickly as cacti, others as gay and playful as dandelions. They touch on his early probes into psychology, philosophy, pop culture and his burgeoning awareness of those primordial drives that inform us all with their rude awakening. All of them seem anchored to some sort of conceit that make them entertaining formally as well as textually. They emerge as fallible as human nature despite their at times didactic appearance. So enjoy this big bouquet of poesies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669868958

Book preview

Copyright © 2023 by Frank De Canio.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/28/2023

Xlibris

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CONTENTS

Bristling Lament

A Winter’s Day

Shadows

The Dethroning of Ali

To Michele

To Miriam

Samson Unbound

A Crazy Sonnet

Xenia

The Flying, Love-Sick Physician

Nuptials

In Defense of Boxing

Poetries

20 Caprices

Third Elegy

Salutary Constraint

Ode To The Working Poor

Judgement Day

Daddy Dearest

Credo

Sex

A Pilgrim’s Progress

Dear God

The Masochist’s Plea to His Love Goddess

Passages

News From the Home Front

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

Making My Way

For His Unfair Mistress

Leeward Leanings

America

More News From the Home Front

At the Crossroads

Places in the Heart

Birthday Greetings

A Lover’s Lament

Beautiful Bertha

Homeless

A Valentine Rag

The Banker’s Trust

Another Elegy

Inspiration

Amorous Footfalls

Ode to the Muse

Triolet with Nosegay

After the Fall

First Lesson in Ophthalmology

Mother Love

Footfalls

Bowling For 300

Glad Tidings

Reviewing Kieslowski

Dancing with Heather

Prelude to Der Rosenkavalier

A Modest Proposal

New Year Resolution

For the End of Time

For the Impertinent Critic

XXXanta

Serenade in Seeing Sharp

The Masochist’s Triumph

Foraging

A Woman’s Right

How to Sell a Fascist Cake

Salome

For the Mother of 7 year old Jessica

Compulsion

Delinquent

Sounding People Out

The Coda of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony

The Closing Fugue Of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony

The Great Poet Poses with the Snow Princess

Love’s Labors Lost

The Sleep of Reason

Sonata in A Flat

Felix Culpa

Elegy for the Murdered Child

Peking Opera Blues

Aphrodite’s Wards

Flirting with My Muse

Passenger

Rebuffed Enough

Madonna and Child

Attitude

Headline

Knight of Love

Symphonic Elegy

Enroute on a Train from Frankfurt

Requiem

Opus 20

In the Bonds of Death

Spawn

Modern Perils

Dies Irae

Pour Jacqueline

Canned Violence

Desiree

Becoming

Baptism by Fire

Vanquished

Terms of Peace

Trinket

Hunter

Bane

Hell’s Angel

Child’s Play

My Dear Amanda

Answering Machine

Sparing the Rod

Seizure

Grudge Match

Postpartum

Mariner

Seductive Hold

Horsemanship

The Don Undone

Orpheo in the Buff

Feeding Frenzy

Topless Hostess

Topless Bar Hostess

Table Dance

Suburban Transport

Waitress

Benediction

Horsewoman

Post Rosenkavalier

Fish Story

Cello Concerto

Free Wheeling Determinism

Salesgrrrl

Singsong

Please Don’t Return My Call!

Michael’s Mop

Baleful Harvest

At the French Open

Tristan

Girl With Younger Brother

Brandi Does the World Cup

Sharecropper

Outskirts

Night of Doleful Countenance

Women in Love

Day Two Dames

Hot Rod

Y’all

Sports Car

Witchcraft

Seizing Control

Bar Grrrls

December 3¹st

Cashier Chick

Armed

Bachelor’s Lament

Girl with Tseng in Southern China

Punch

Please, No Apologies

My Spunky Valentine

Moonstruck

Epiphany

Rocking Ramona

Scylla

Hydra

Fast Food

Midnight Thoughts

Border Crossings

Fore Play

Henpecked

State of Siege

Criminal

Safecracker

Morticians of the World

Howl!

Fetish

Sex Wars

Venus Flytrap

Breast Assured

She Dressed Me Down

Female Knockouts

Reader

Donna Quixote

Fighting Femme

Star Struck

Role Play

Beach Balls

Thief

Fear

Miss Metamorphosis

Transport

Storming Borders

Wedlock

Hip Hop

Tomb at Uhm el-Marra

Time Warp

Usurping New Year

Footboy

Stepwise

My God

Morass

Mug

The Milk of Human Kindness

After Seeing Valerie Solanis’ Up Your Ass

After Leaving Las Vegas

Bounty Huntresses

Telephone Service

Yo Mama

Sound Attire

Confectioner

Pastor

Shake and Bake

Salubrious Nightmare

Jamaican Mother

Cell Phone

Bust Service

Lacing Up

Beset

Human Harvest

Masquerade

Diaphanous Veil

Ye Gads!

Palm

La Chica Dorada

Shave

Chicks!

Whew!

Onward Christian Soldiers!

Borne Again

Efflorescence

Last Laugh

September 11, 2001

Dancing at Twilight

World Trade Center

Pray Tell, Queen of Swords

He Prayeth Best

Unadorned

Viva Selena!

Taliban: The Movie

Diphthong

Opera Comique

Parried

Date Scrape

That Nasty Chick

Snow Show

Book Piracy

En Garde

Roadblocks

Ciao Mayor!

Fiscal Sex

Milling for Mills

Mime Over Matter

Top Hat

Plenty Twenty

Smiling, She Said

Rapes of Wrath

Benighted Bliss

Security Clerk

Beseech God

It’s Just Not Fair

The Ring of the Nibelungen

Basic Training

Suicide Bombing in Tel Aviv

Misconceiving Eve

Sentenced

Judith Flies American

Cell Phone Blues

The Last Straw

Borne Again

Casts

Leave-Taking

The Ninth Hour

Nasty Salesclerk Rap

Lincoln Center Out of Drawers

Rag Liege

Chairman of the Broad

Riding Passion

BRISTLING LAMENT

Who will love you when I am gone

when all the curtains have been drawn

and love remains a mystery?

When your frenetic ecstasy

lies settled on a wrinkled brow,

now, who will harmonize your vow,

when yet unwritten songs are sung,

and rusty churchyard bells have rung

to toll the fading reverie

that festers in your memory,

and drowns the din that echoes near

to sound the death knell in your ear

when death is left to dwell upon,

who will love you when I am gone?

Previously published in Long Story Short, June 2010

A WINTER’S DAY

A winter morning storm’s despoiled

a time-worn city, drab and soiled.

But this antique is now aglow

with soft, white roses, row on row.

And shoppers snug in masquerade

of fluffy clothes, form long parades

of ruby faces, bright and gay,

delighting in its bright display.

Still, winter’s day, enrobed in white,

parades in silence through the night,

beside its gilded silver glow,

embroidered like a bride’s trousseau.

SHADOWS

Are we reflections from a reading light

that flickers with a novelist’s regrets;

appendices that he forgot to write

an expurgated character’s vignettes?

Are we the rough draft of a scribbler’s pen,

the doodling of his hypnogogic brain,

the fantasies of his unconscious yen,

deleted studies for a mise en scene?

Perhaps we’re first draft chapters in a book

that’s still unfolding in an author’s mind.

Our mindsets show the work a writer took

to shape protagonists. We’ll never find

a publisher because his stories plod

despite the fact that he believes he’s God.

THE DETHRONING OF ALI

(at the hands of Leon Spinks)

Behold the man,

crowned with the thorns

of tormenting Time;

stripped of his past

galloping stride;

a mounted stallion

in his final ride.

The relic of a panting age

that will not sit still

against the hawking wind

that takes his own away;

in the forlorn flight

of his fighting spirit;

bridled and reined

for the pastured plains

of his tamed dominion.

His laboring breath,

in the late spawning

of a second wind,

borne aloft,

then lost again;

the time-worn offering

to the kindling thrust

of the seeds he’d sown,

the coming of an age,

and the passing of his own.

TO MICHELE

If you must leave me,

do so quickly;

not like the fastidious dentist

who fusses with the rotten tooth,

juggling it this way and that

before the patient gets a caveat

that it must be pulled.

Do it rapidly, in one fell swoop.

Take the molar, festered

and decayed from too much

sugary affection,

and extract it at the root.

Like the storied knight,

go into the mouth

of the serpent’s cave

and, fearless of its fiery fang,

put the restive beast to rest.

Donning shiny armor

of compassion, ensure

the maiden virtue

of my love’s devotion

is spared prolonged distress.

TO MIRIAM

Let it be

that I offended you

with something that I said;

a bit of sarcasm

that made you leave

so suddenly; and I might

yet steal, like Prometheus,

the fire in your soul.

Perhaps there’s something

up your sleeve;

some cunning, meant

to shake the firmament

of my complacency

with countless burning stars

of newly-fired galaxies.

Let the wound that’s healed

conceal a thousand scars!

I’d rather die in molten steel

on fires stoked by you,

than to congeal

among a host of frozen

memories, bereft of you.

So let it be

that you will leave

for all the things

I’ve yet to do

to win you, if I can.

But not because of me,

and not for what I am.

SAMSON UNBOUND

So you’d used the cradle of embracing arms

to rockabye infantilizing rage!

As if the soporific of your charms

could obfuscate the wisdom of my age.

Ah yes! You pacified the weaning child

who foraged suckling breasts to end love’s drought.

Its budding bonnet quickened as you smiled,

like flowers to a gushing waterspout.

Perhaps you thought Narcissus would respond

to your indulgent, mirroring conceit

usurping my reflection in the pond

where I felt efflorescent and complete.

Or maybe shunning flower for the fruit

you seethed with more insidious pursuit.

You must have thought of husky Hercules,

submissive in a woman’s frilly dress,

as Omphale swung his virile club with ease,

appeased to see him labor with distress.

Were you Delilah - temptress! philistine! -

seducing Samson from his proud estate?

She placed his head upon her knees with spleen,

cropped seven of his locks, then scoffed his fate.

As if your sultry lips‘ subversive shears

could cut the steely fork-tongue of my hate.

Oh, weakened by the suffering of years,

and shorn of love, I‘d meekly abdicate.

But Samson‘s hair again adorned his crown,

and with God‘s hand brought spiteful revels down.

A CRAZY SONNET

Isn’t it odd that in an ever ex-

panding universe, bursting out of its

ill-stitched seams; hard, psychopathic humans

who kill, rape women or torture children,

are leavened with the notion "emotion-

ally disturbed products of broken homes"

(an apt enough description of psychic

dereliction, but not of broken bones)?

It’s indeed ludicrous that lexicons

interdict the better word lunatic

for destructive people deemed truly mad,

while a stable, adhesive substance that,

like a pure, God-inspired Galahad,

brings together and binds blind, disparate

objects (that might run amok in this zoo

we call the world) is labeled Krazy Glue.

XENIA

Xenia said she’d buy me a computer.

She promised me this hunk of merchandise

years ago, when I first got to know her.

Yet for all my courting and being nice

to her, and though my unshaved passion shows

like thick and prickly bristles on my face,

it grows to a purpose God only knows.

For my ‘electric’ is still in its place.

And my dreams of a beaming screen that glows

with pica type bright as her gleaming eyes,

fade with the hairs on my head, like rainbows

arching over cloudbursts in liquid skies.

Since past covenants don’t seem to suit her,

I’ve lost both Xenia and my computer.

THE FLYING, LOVE-SICK PHYSICIAN

The doctor who developed the penile

prosthesis to treat impotence in men

crashed the airplane he was piloting while

attempting to land near his vacation

home in Maine. The inventor of the in-

flatable penis, apparently lost

control of his own stalled, single-engine

craft, before the airborne apparatus

plummeted to the ground, and exploded,

with the force of its forward moving thrust,

into pieces of fuselage - scattered

like ejaculate of a colossus.

The flying love Doc stuck it to the skies,

then winged propulsion with climactic sighs.

NUPTIALS

After a while

you forget how

to do it. Smiles

slip to frowns. Jowls

become stitched in

place. And the face

and brow begin

to fall from grace.

Nothing remains

but bad habits

to hide the shame

of being stripped

for death. And then –

his wrinkled grin.

IN DEFENSE OF BOXING

So you think that boxing is a brutal sport;

that brawling fighters in