One night in poetry class

I recently slipped a poetry class here at the Guthrie, mainly because the class was almost empty and I didn't want the instructor to get lonely, but also because like every well-read and underemployed person under the age of 40, I believe in me the soul a poet lurketh, lurketh like the lemming lurketh lowers't the ledge, laughing, laughing! (That was a joke, even I aim higher than that.) It was actually a surprisingly good class with a great instructor, and the small size of the class allowed us to collaborate on a poem in Elizabethan short verse about a clown trying to pick up a hooker (oh it's anything goes at the G-spot).

As it happens, recently I've been too busy walking around Chinatown in the rain trying to evoke Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, and then huddling under blankets rubbing tiger balm on my chest to ward off the bird flu to add anything to my blog, so I thought I'd just share with my vast readership the product of one of the various poetry exercises from that class:

Wily xanthous yelling Zulus after ball careening down every field, green hellions in jest keeping laughter momentarily nestled over poisonous questions racing sideways under veils.

Since that class was poetry for the stage, I also had to do a dramatic reading in character of another poem I wrote, in front of professional actors, which to me was a more daunting prospect than dubbing a Nicholas Cage film into Cantonese. So picture if you will, a grizzled Roman senator standing with the ultras at a Lazio game. In the middle of all this flashing yellow chaos my senator stands fixed in his resplendent red and white toga like a fluted ionic column being washed over by the tide, immovable, reappearing behind every wave. And he says to himself and the audience this piece of verse (nodding in the second line to the flashing jumbotron suspended over the field):

A new bread and circus
under Jove's blinking eye
I am the dying Gaul coughing
"Ca plus change, ca plus meme*"

(*-The more things change, the more they remain the same)