Reading through Eliot’s poetry, I’m trying to decide how much to look for meaning in his poetry, and how much just to appreciate the beauty of words and sounds, knowing there’s no meaning to be had. Some of his stuff definitely carries meaning in it, but some of it seems random. I love T.S. Eliot, but I’m not a big fan of this idea of separating sounds from their meaning. So, I wrote a poem about it in the closest appropriation I can come of about his style.

O T, why write for sound and not
for meaning, meaning sound is free
from meaning, the silently snapped knot
hawsering back and forth across reality?
You think you’ve freed them, but
these words were meant to, long to
mean; you free them, tree them, see them
wither on the vine until the wine
is more vinegar than poetry.
O T, set them free from freedom,
leash them as the kite is tethered
to the wind, or forgiveness to them that have
sinned; rescind this epistemological,
pseudo-theological, really scatological
trend. Word mean; they cannot not
no more than things cannot be not.