Commuter

David Cornell DeJong

published in the Georgia Review, 1959 (p. 286)


I heard it said behind me on the train:
"You are the coolest chit of a monkey.
You keep trapezing up my gullible ribs
Making life and breath come rare and spunky.

I tried to put my brazen ears aside, undo
My raucous listening, and even gargoyled
My face into a Collected Lord Tennyson,
Yet kept on feeling combustible and royled.

I wrote a score of learned annotations
With academic but shaky hand in the margin,
But Victorian poetry seemed awfully dead,
And for all its classic front spoke pidgin.



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