This page has an odd provenance: I’d just eaten French toast. There was a puddle of butter/syrup on the plate. A bagel was available to sop it up (Goodness GRACIOUS, what a Glutton), but the puddle didn’t want to cooperate. Then I remembered that magic of physics known as Capillary Action, and set two bagel-quarters inside-down and waited; lo, they did absorb. This led me to read up on Capillary Action via Wikipedia, and that led to lacrimal ducts, and acrostic compulsion led to Lacrimal Ductwork.

The acrostic defies pure rhyming, but the first thing that occurred to me was that “you” rhymes with the “goût” of the French expression “chacun à son goût,” which may be translated to “each to his own.” Then the first line sprang to be, but the third line could only be near-rhymed, and, Heaven help me, I could not resist trying “hermaphroditic.” This led to thinking about how Man’s Inhumanity to Man might be cured with androgyny (anyone under forty read THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K. LeGuin?), and then the poem pushed me aside completely and wrote itself.

Here are the words:

LIQUIDITY may not need Liquid
And TRAGEDY may not need U
CAUSALITY’s hermaphroditic
RIGHTEOUS? Chacun à son goût.
IDEALLY we’d never kow-tow
MISANTHROPY makes us so do
ANDROGYNY’s a higher power
LUCIDITY unkinks a Kook

I don’t think it’s too much a stretch to relate all this to Lacrimal Ductwork, which involves Crying.