Paradox (dual lines beside Swinburne's grave)

I needed to write to feel rejected and thereby have something to write about,
But my fluency, provisional until people follow,
Mounts when they respond, even when migraine wrecks that purchasing gwick in my swallow;
And reconciling rejection with recognition I hear my daughter cry out
"Papa!" in the night. There is such fear in her voice: "I dreamt you were pushing the swing
Without me in the seat, and it was swinging round the bar hitting you on the head.
Each time you were hit you looked at me, Papa, like you were getting more bewildered."

The swing's seat by sudden discontinuities in its revolutions, jouncing
And catapulting into my head, is my conceit, Swinburne,
(The gravestone looks askance,) excessive applications of treatment for scalp ringworm
To jaundice myself, so that I may feel like I am inexorably nearing
Death (the lobed hilt of its carved sword holding the atheist in a sacred redoubt);
But my knowing that I can cease treatment and presently be safely delivered
Precludes me from capitalising on concentrated thought. Merely bewildered,
I am merely bewildered.
                (In locus below the ledger's tang, bones may not hear me,
                Nor pressed primroses to press-gang a heathen's corpse)