I'm wondering. In what voice shall I launch

this contemplated hundred sonnets, this pell-mell

sequence (more like Frank O'Hara's Lunch

than anything by Petrarch, Keats, or Lowell)?

Too much! These rhymed pentameters: fourteen

a day each morning for three months!

Folly, to drudge out dutifully written

lines that crouch and limp in a hobbling dance.

If I were Mallarmé, I'd take my time

and give the world the whitest swan of winter.

But I'm too buzzed on 3 am caffeine

to offer more than this off-kilter rhyme,

woodwork with beams that any blow could splinter,

structure that even the slightest breeze could lean.