A Story of O

O spent his days marking clay His stories lost in tallies of grain His musings reduced to muttering Till a tea break gave his stylus time For subversive rhymes Twixt a horse and a chair

O was there when they melted the lead And pulled the first sheet from the press O stuck again in a book of numbers Fust looking to tally returns And the pamphlets crowding backstage Left O no time to compare Corn with ideas

O learned the code Where the dot engaged the dash And where the smoke from cigars There was the ceasefire they faked For the usual to take stock Yet still O yearned for More noble earnings

O already the o in steno turned she Who feigns insane to uncover the inside While between the illumination in ink And the jaundice of yellow The counting of coins Pulverized her words into sensations

But look O, are you ready for radio? There are stories to tell with the opening of jar lids The mixing of sounds from a mars to mercury Till theatre goes wrong in the space Between trick and panic

O feels scolded but not without hope She resolves to the art of make up And help with the faces of the young hopeful In the debate between the face and the voice The vote favors the sweatless

O bemoans the ratio Between promises of borderless bandwidth And bullshit of spam and viruses The offers of knowing each time eclipsed By lip service to ideals buried in the ledger Yet O still casts her net for a dream Of something less apparatchik

O knows the flow of artifice invented Never slows audacity incarnate For ambitions insatiable Dot the maps of assets indexed And the mad dash of adulterated interests Preclude all introspection Yet still O pines to share A dream of ascendance imagined.