It’s never a breeze to begin in the middle
of things, though more of a tease to end when just start-
ing. To get down on your knees for such a project?
Better to read and lunch, put up your feet
and wait in your chemise for the mail to come, forget
all other burdens, reasons, strivings, tramp-

le them. After failing to fail tramp
off to a bookstore (your modern grail) in the middle
of middle age you’ve come to this formal jail to forget
what you might otherwise have start-
ed. And in this line there now flail five dull feet.
Don’t derail your reader, instead project

your voice, your mind, like an out-of-focus you project-
ed on a screen, while rhymes as on a tramp-
oline bounce from line to line on feet
as unsteady as the half-blind taste of middle-
brow readers. In a bind, Don’t get me start-
ed, you’ll opine, as with repetends you sink into forget-

fulness. But once you’ve gone this far, forget
going back or giving up as your son shoots project-
iles at you for fun that make you start
up from your chair (he’s already on the run), tramp
into his getaway room, slip on a crayon in the middle
of the floor, and spy under the bed a pair of feet

sticking out. And is it cheating if I switch from feet
to feat, from you to I? Would you, impatient reader, find forget-
table (now that we’ve beaten the middle)
if I slipped up on the project
introduced mistakes that might tramp-
le this already bumpy form so you’d be start-

led? How many hyphenated words to start
or end a line? Would you stamp your feet (at such a feat)?
and walk away? A poem about nothing: no tramp,
no dame or dude in distress except the poem to forget?
Who wouldn’t be bored by such a project?
Perhaps you’re undeterred by no middle in the middle.

Now, let’s both forget this project
and trample under our feet
what was never middle but ended at the start!