In Glorious Response

(Advice poster #3 in the writing center: "Always write – and read – with the ear, not the eye. You should hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again.")

What does it mean, “if it doesn’t sounds nice.”
Must it sound pretty and nice,
as sweet to the ear as chocolate is to the tongue?
What if a sentence is bitter, soured by death and pain and fear?
It shouldn’t play nicely on the ear
Like an over-sweet rhyme
“If it doesn’t sound right, try again,”
sounds nicer than “nice.”

Precision is obscurity’s doppelganger.
“A square is a square! I see it precisely.”
Geometry sits passenger-side, shotgun ready,
And shoots deer from a pickup truck near
The forest of semantics.
From the road, Geometry shouts,
“A tree is triangle not a cone! A deer, a square quadruped
Riddled with my cylindrical
(bang!)
Now circular
Slugs.”
Precision grasps the steering wheel,
Revs the engine
And turns
To laugh with Geometry as
They bumble along what mapmakers call
A perfect and straight country road.

Perception is but a daydream of truth.
A black cloud, a bitter wind
That suddenly, sweetly, ruffles the hair
Of a child who ducks under a slick tire-swing
And spins, arms out, in a sort of wet rain
That drenches the rich black earth of an
Iowan cornfield,
That rusts the iron of a barbed, brush entangled fence.