PARODY Poem: The Second Chance, by Paul Pruitt

Tossing and turning in ink-stained firmament,
The author loses grasp upon her document.
The thing beyond proof, divine afflatus,
Swoops past the scholar’s apparatus.
The blue-ink’d tide is dammed; under the lash
The spasms of failed footnotes writhe and crash.
Critical Studies smolder, intensify, ignite
Past power of spadework to trace a cite.
Surely a New Age is at hand.

Surely the critics will disappear,
Old ways overturned! But with that phrase,
A chill sight out of mondo academico
Freezes the brain. Out of the vapor comes
The Beast; one who, roughly, turns
All to inward:
Tautological, tendentious, a shaggy dog.

Ghosts of the Realists follow its reductions,
Wraiths of tattered reason, wailing their deductions—
Coiling, self-contradictory, noways more strong
Than dream-children of deconstruction can prolong.
Rocking to and fro, reanimating speech, the cur seeks
To paddify its vita, and at length it speaks
(Rumbling alphaomega, a mobius of facilitiz)
A motto of strange effect: “It iz what it iz.

Author: poetryfest

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