I’ve been reading old nursery rhymes I was exposed to in tinyhood by a teenaged aunt and twenty-year-old mother. They must have enthralled me as I lay me down to sleep in the pre-reason season; they still do. Why? Obscenely simple, laden with gibberish, they start nowhere and lead there — rhythmic, resolute, unapologetic. 

A robin and a robin’s son
Once went to town to buy a bun.
They couldn’t decide on plum or plain
And so they went back home again.

But the dipsy-doodle ebullience they awaken, relieved of judgment, exempt from demand, eases me unexpectedly into poetry upon which my dolefully cogitating adult self finds dicey footing, if any. Here’s an excerpt from Justin Rovillos Monson’s “I WISH I HAD MORE TIME IN THE DAY”* (the caps are Monson’s):

There are secrets to keep and secrets we fit inside
so I palm the universe so still still still
in both hands & speak here
in tongues when you come come

around. Long as I’m a city, you’ll always have a place to sit

a wall to lean on & get your fiend on.

‘Thank you for using—‘

If you don’t read with the tyranny of expectation, you get what’s simply there. The repetition. The cadenced quasi-rhyming (lean on… fiend on). The interiority marked by saucy disconnective turbulence. Pie in the face. Finger in the eye. Je m’en foutisme. The if-I-should-die-before-I-wake-ism pounded by protestant grandmothers. The drugginess: Thank you for using. What’s the plural of double-entendre? Redoubled understandings? I’d rather spin the question than know the answer. 

It’s hard to put a finger on how verse like Justin Rovillos Monson’s squeaks through doors of reception left half ajar by surreal doggerel squatting in a scratched-up book. But the finger is raised. 

*Poetry, December 2024.

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