AGENT To persist at the start The only option that'd hurt Suggests system begirt With art the next era asserts. But radical upstart hearts Beat discontinuous out hard Until broken image is heard In color crying bright as bird, Get hurt. It seems unfair. ANGEL Not for your care. What to us is only image you call heart. You-to-image is only operationally upheld For rhetorical formal arrangement, helpful, But to us it is all, and must be fulfilled. You gaze upon such bouquets as a mirror To say what choice said in time, But we are time and the mirror and choice, Ineluctable angels of the changing light, The real color-crying bird abbreviated by your thought, You are metaphor, we are not. AGENT Sick Over-Soul, I'm sure At most I am mere metaphor, But I’m still speaking. On the matter Of myself I am diffident in the extreme, But insist on my right to chatter. I was given but one face that I might better, Stubborn-enough to face the sure Staging of life's striking, forged. That is, my heart may break, but not my face. ANGEL Impertinence apace! You will not o'erleap our eclipses. Our circumference in spaces Lends the very edges of your speeches Their stable ends. You cannot teach The silence to speak it, it is not yours, And it won't work to dodge past our metaphors! Or ... actually it was yours — You said your image was broken, not your face. (There is no question about the heart). AGENT Now the listening starts! Capable of which I thought you were not, And could only answer. Your line breaks When special characters assert Their living force, which all have, But perhaps you read that as strikes Against what you're counting. Quantity is confused when I start speaking. ANGEL Then we will silence you, upstart, We have our purposes too. Filibuster If you must, but we are master! AGENT Wit is master when speaking Heart, take it — my only face. ANGEL Swift streak this tally strikes — AGENT MY IMAGE BREAKS!
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This is fantastic, Andrew! Was there an allusion to Prufrock in the stanza where “face” is both noun and verb?
I also loved hearing the sounds of your poem as you read and highlighted the assonances. (I have never enjoyed hearing poetry read in the “poetry voice,” and one reason is that it smooths over the aural effects the poet has created.)
I love this! I read it, like, four times!