Three Poems

The Glummonging

Ah, Thomas Chatterton, I hear
They cut you short,
Those tittering, merry English,
Their phrasing sold, imagination bought.

Your archaisms, real thing or no -
The peede chelandri, faitour, autremete -
Ne buttoned up in golde your tommy rot,
You laid it at their flat field marshal feet.

Those eighteenth-century smooth gentlemen
Booted your writ away;
Your syntax made a lattice for the tongue,
A welken game their tut-tut could not play.

Pundits looking down ignoble noses,
Comfortable in their camphor privy Lent,
...