3 : Epode

Listen in counterpoint.

There are two voices here now.

One is saying why bother,

the other, its insidious brother

argues the safest counter:

why not?

This be not the verse,

nor any stanza, couplet.

It is a strophe.

It is not prose,

God knows -

there is quite

enough of that.

“Yet is it poetry?”

Counterpoint becomes

contradiction

and still it might be an ode,

owed to you

the sufferer of these ill-

chosen chopped-logic lines.

So the end is reached,

for reader and scrivener,

for voices on and off

you have read

strophe, antistrophe

this epode

this entire ode

is to catastrophe.