Because of Odin Roark's 'Lexiconic Starvation' contribution to AD this morning, I am compelled to post a 1983 poem I wrote after having read Jack London's Martin Eden and the vocabulary words I had to look up during that reading experience, making sure the definitions made sense in my use of them.

           A Vignette

I sit and think of paltry things,
of tawdry people who
politely boast their platitudes;
these self-impressions to renew,
their inwardly-focused certitudes.

I see holographs of smug pretenses
cloaked with meretricious ruse,
each disconcerting insolence --
the henchmens' ecclesiastic abuse;
dogmatic admonitions that
lie curled at their boots,
abysmal and capricious.

The avaricious ones palliate
their eccentric complacencies
with epithets inveterate
that they vindicate prodigiously.

Eliciting facetious proclivities,
they upbraid antagonistic heretic's
antithesis as apparitions
filled with virulence,
inveigling the venerable loyalties
from states of inexorable
countenance to erratic perils
of repudiated liberals.

I extrapolate a ribald paradox
between the lugubrious bourgeoisie
and the facile avant-garde to be
a virulent vexation.

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