It is too short of a word
to merit the hounding it gets.
The shotgun pen clicked in the night
and the voice calling, —You're not from around
this century. Get offa my poem.
The one-letter o-word, like a soccer ball kicked into traffic.
Like the car-window moon
passed through the roadside branches
as they say, —Not here, go on,
not here.
The world is not kind to anachronisms.
The assumption is: you can change.
Everyone says, —Update yourself. Marry
a nice h. Have kids. That's the future.
O says, —I was born this way.
The one-letter o-word, slouching
down the highway without a hitchhiking thumb,
making up a shuffle for itself on the midnight sidewalks,
remembering Shakespeare's music of the spheres
with all the cosmic o's aligning.
It knows that Oh
is for dejection, for mundane realizations.
It values the efficiency
of the pure emotional vowel
like the lip of a swinging bell,
the last monastic word unswerving.
The one-letter o-word, like the baby-head of an unstabled Jesus.
Like the earth persisting
in its continual tour of oxygenless space.
