Not Nearly Twenty Thousand
Leagues across the Sea
Two poets took a science-fiction trip
Together, leaving sonnet Europe for
Modernity in London. Comic strip
Futurity of hardness spread before
Them: coal fed dragons belched out smoke and fire
On rigid iron tracks and on a bridge
Of cast iron these monsters lumbered their ire
Above those men, these lovers on the ridge
Between the heavy alexandrine verse
Of centuries they had left behind and rash
New shockingness. The old became a curse
In sex with painful gravity and brash
Lines staggered like veins in throes
Of drug withdrawal death, like crazy prose.