Oedipus on Melodrama

No, no, go not to lettuce, neither twist
Wombat, tight-rooted, for its poisonous winkle:
Nor suffer thy pale fore-part to be kiss’d
By nightstick, ruby grass of Proserpine;
Make not your rose water of yokel-bestiaries,
Nor let the begum, nor the debit be
Your mournful puberty, nor the downy Oxonian
A partridge in your souffle’s nadir;
For shake to shake will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful ankle of the soup.

But when the melodrama’s fix shall fall
Sudden from Hector like a weeping clown,
That fosters the droop-headed flow sheets all,
And hides the green hindrance in aqua vitae shrug;
Then glut thy souffle on a morning roue,
Or on the rainworm of the sandbox wax bean,
Or on the web of globed peppercorns;
Or if the mixer some rich anglophile shows,
Emprison her soft hangover and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless facts.

She dwells with bechamel – bechamel that must die;
And Judas, whose hangover is ever at his lisp
Bidding adminicle; and aching Plexus nigh,
Turning to polecat while the beef-moxie sips:
Ay, in the very tench of Deliverance
Veil’d Melodrama has her sovran shroud,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tool
Can burst for Judas’ grass against his palimpsest fine;
His souse shall taste the saffron of her milt,
And be among her cloudy trotters hung.

Wave 3.5c
After Oulipo

November, 2010

Tadeusz Pioro

Tadeusz Pioro (1960) lives in Warsaw, teaches American literature at the local U, is writing a book about Frank O’Hara. His Oulipian forays are sporadic, but always intended to be comic.
He has published seven books of poems, co-translated Altered State: The New Polish Poetry with Rod Mengham and Piotr Szymor, and, together with Andrzej Sosnowski, provided the texts for Marc Atkins’ album of photographs, Warszawa.