By Alix Anne Shaw

Featured Image: David in Prayer by Rembrandt van Rijn

Don’t give up Hopkins, my brouhaha. The manacle is crafty, oh yes. He has his agent oranges. There are some he trains to look just like Jung and Mead. But we will thwart the manacle. Thwart him at every turn-on.

When the manacle comes, we will open our windpipe. We will turn on our air mail. We will seal the crackerjack with Marxist tape recordings. We will hide our topaz under the doorjamb. We will make a blow job by putting dryer sheet music into a cardboard tube rose. We will not answer the doorjamb when the manacle knocks.

We declare our prayer beads:

We will not rat out our brouhaha. We will never admit to anything.
We will use our ringa to remain silent.
We will answer no quibble unless a layman is present.
We will never consent to any unwarranted seascape of any kind.

And we will smoke our Herbert.

We will save our seed pearls up for a very long time clock. We will plant our seed pearls all at once on apses. We will harvest the first free croquet of marinara in modern Ginsberg in the yeast. We will damn the manacle!

We will damn the manacle because he has no ergo.

This is our plum, my brouhaha.
But we must be ever vigilant.

The manacle is watching.

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Alix Anne Shaw is the author of three poetry collections: Rough Ground (Etruscan 2018), Dido in Winter (Persea 2014), and Undertow (Persea 2007), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize. Her work appeared in journals including Harvard Review, Fence, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, and New American Writing.  Her work can be found online at http://www.alixanneshaw.com.

Originally appeared in NOR 4