text

oh where is your inflammatory writ?
your text that would inside a light be lit
our music deserving, devotion unswerving
cry Do i deserve her with unflagging fervor
well, no we do not if we cannot get over it.

but what's it mean when suddenly we're spent?
tell me true,
ambition came and reared its head and went,
far from you-
even mollusks have weddings, though solemn and leaden
but your dirge for the dead, and take no jam on your bread
just a supper of song and a waltz through your empty bed

and all it once it came to me
and i wrote him hunched 'til four thirty
but that vestal light, it burns out with the night
in spite of all that time that we spent on it
on one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet
while outside, the wild boars root
without bending a bough underfoot
oh it breaks my heart, i don't know how they do it
so don't ask me

and as for my inflammatory writ.
well, i wrote it and i was not inflamed one bit
advice from the master derailed that disaster
he said Hand that pen over to me, poetaster
while across the great plains, keen and lovely and awful
you eulolate the lost Great American Novels
an unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit.
But at least they didn't run, to their undying credit.