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1.  The word love is hereby banished from all future poems.  Except on Wednesdays.  Or during rare celestial events:  a blue moon, the aurora borealis.

2.  Ditto on all references to beauty and its second cousin twice removed, the beautiful.

3.  Parenthetical phrases set off by either full-fledged parantheses or more straightforward dashes are from here on out verboten.

4.  As of today, colors will be used out of sheer necessity only: cornflower blue especially and the kick-your-ass-till-Sunday red of sumptuous Russian icons.

5.  Food, flowers, fruit, and birds (but in particular the flowers) will be admitted only after long scrutiny and scrupulous selection.

6.  In compliance with #5, all collateral floriferation will be henceforth disallowed: evil will not flower, no cunt shall be called rosaceous.

7.  Lists and every variation thereof, whether in pairs, triplets, strings of 5 or 6 or even 10 shall from now on be ruthlessly crimped, cropped, clipped, compressed, condensed, curtailed, corralled, roped in or otherwise seriously contained (the present sentence nothwithstanding).

8.  No poem will take for its setting or its subject any place more exotic than its own back yard.

9.  Similes will be carted off in chains, and water will not taste of anything but water.  So if I say that all poetic readymades and tics will be mercilessly flushed out, I will not add: like pheasants from a dead brown field in the fall.

10.  And because the heart is overused and wreckless, flooding its banks at every turn to make a stupendous mess of things, and because the sole objective is to strike poems that are mad, bad and dangerous to know (which is how someone described the whoremonger genius Caravaggio), the word heart and all its variations including heartbreak, heartsore, ache will be sentenced from this day forward to perpetual, irrevocable exile.

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