Playing Tennis Without a Net

There is no correction on improvement in
the sway of ambition and routine redefinition of
bread as first judged to be reputable.
All encouragement was crowned with
mercy and spit, and driven like a spike into
the humble institution of tennis.
I took an oath, I cleaned a revolution of all its
spots, and took a frosty sojourn across
the field of knife fights and pick ax excursions.
The poem returned to abstraction without
vowels, without sprung rhythm.
I was of no help with my humanist
palms and grasshopper syntax.
The truth needed to be worked over
behind the woodshed, as our good neighbor
Robert Frost let the air out of radicalism.
It is the crooked way that wins the worm,
that farms the bird, that converts the net into grandeur.