How to roast chicken in a sestina

Regard your first roast, greet your hunger to learn. Every why, what and how.
Open vistas and worlds beyond that state you were born to.
A devilish-streak grins gold and flames, now you’re aspiring to cook.
Surety and wisdom accumulate in scars from blades sharp and vessels hot.
The domestic martial art channels boil, sauté, poach fry and roast.
Sending soaring the fledgling that never could even stumble like chicken.


Be sure to obtain a glorious kitchen, paltry surrounds making miserable chicken.
Elegance, being your meal’s prime condition, must be enlisted, no matter how.
Charm divines diamonds and fine china plates; ham-fisted advances, a ruinous roast.
Keep your wits in fine circles, tease, please, wield wiles as you need to.
Only unbatten hatches for well-endowed kitchens in neighbourhoods hot.
Never reveal, yet insist all you want is the space to be a good cook.


Halt now, calm yourself, and imagine your perfect day on which you cook.
Undue haste will lay waste to your raison d'être with that of the chicken.
Negotiate dates with guests primary and prime, no empty seat nor kitchen too hot.
Go all the way and verify your perfect date the way numerologists know how.
Ready yourself with invitations, wine lists and glean which markets to go to.
Your perfect day set in train, utterly needs a fine bird in hand to roast.


Death is the most inconvenient and essential ingredient in the roast
Insist someone tender and able kills and prepares the carcass you’ll cook
No essential aspect of the bird remains, but find a good one, if you want to.
Enlist a poet to extol the extinguished life of your noble chicken.
Remember how it knew how to chicken and none of your guests know how.
Serve its memory best on the day with gravy and steaming hot.


Decisiveness will serve you well on the day you finally make the bird hot.
Enough heat in the oven and you will feel it. Just like a roast.
Senses out and intuition on full. No calculus. Just finally knowing how.
Imagination, intuition and intention are all you need to cook.
Roast is just a slow burn that stops before black chicken.
Everyone has advice, but in the end you’ll just do what you’re going to.


Make a spectacle of the meal, but don’t offer everything you planned to.
Arrange to deliver adjectives subliminally, like tasty, succulent and hot.
Ready yourself for criticism and critique: no one loves your lifeless chicken.
Venture out of the kitchen at critical moments: even cavemen could roast.
Enjoy the day as best you can, since in truth no one likes to cook.
Look carefully at what you have done and begin remembering how.


Everything unfurled now revealed the way to roast is not a how.
A chicken will chook, as launched from a spark you will certainly cook.
The end for you lies beyond hot acclaim for your triumphant roast.


//ends

This sestina began as a joke on Day 11.  Instructions On How to Wind a Watch in the back of my mind. Acrostic.


>> month of poetry 2012