Poem Board

My sestina for craft, as I forgot to photocopy it for everyone.
-
-
Sestina Americana


Once upon a horse
I rode through the Sabbath
So far the land seemed London,
But the bars still played Hank Williams
And in the air narcolepsy
Had the electricity of a poem.

I sat to a poem
As if breaking a horse
With a history of narcolepsy.
On some honky-tonk Sabbath
I imagined seeing Hank Williams
At a peep show in London.

Where but in London
Can you write a decent poem
about Hank Williams?
The drunks in the White Horse
Are equating the Sabbath
With a savage narcolepsy.

O! The bliss of narcolepsy,
The sensation that London
Is heavy beneath a great sabbath
Of light, the Queen reading a poem
That will be branded onto the horse
Given to Hank Williams

For a photo-shoot entitled “Hank Williams,
Singer, diplomat, victim of narcolepsy,
Cowboy poet.” Every horse
In every formal square of London
Is reading a desperate poem
Lamenting the eternal Sabbath

Of marble and bronze. ‘Sabbath’
Meant very little to Hank Williams,
Who once wrote a poem
That implicated the narcolepsy
Of God himself in London’s
Burning, and worshipped a horse.

In the sense that a poem is also a sabbath,
So too is a horse the ghost of Hank Williams’
Narcolepsy dragging itself around London.