I regret I am not the poet I would be.
I do not bear the burden every hour.
I fit it in when moved by reading or pain.
I am a self-medicating poet
Dancing with the words until I feel better
That I have at least written something
That will live after me.
For writing lives after you
If someone will pick up the pieces after you’re gone
If someone will care
And they will wonder why
You could never be satisfied to just be a poet,
Why you had to be everything else,
Whatever was going on,
Whatever seemed interesting at the time.
A poet needs to brood, needs to dwell
On life and the mysteries,
Must hold a thousand things in his pen
Like the reins of an unruly team of mustangs,
Like the circus master surrounded by beasts.
I am mostly managed by events
By moods and opportunities taken and not taken
With the dimension of my life spelled out by
The tales of ordinary men,
The shirtsleeved ones who think little
But only go to work, muse on a mystery
And then fall to sleep.
I am a sounding board for nonsense,
And an amplifier of trivialities,
A spokesman for the mute
And a trial lawyer for the insane
Who plead only to be allowed to live in their fantasies
Like the rest of the population.
I am a scribe of horrors
Witnessed by figments of imagination
And nonsense writers in the air.
I am a lonely man with no one to sing to
And everyone to please,
But no one to listen to and no one to tease.
I am a solitary man a poet of nonsense
And a wanderer from the near shore of sanity
To the outer banks of despair.
You do not hear me and it is just as well.
You are better off not to hear as I am better off not to write
And we will both traverse the night together as saint and sinner,
Mother and muse, nothing wanting,
Nothing used or eaten outright by fame.
I am a winter man, barren and cold
And a bit too old for you to believe in.
As an oddity I gain your respect
But not as a familiar or reflection.
I am a deserted man with no plan and no way out.
I am a deserter as well and lure you to my cause
Like a boney old soldier hidden away
For decades in the bush waiting for
Victory but exposed out of time and ridiculous.
I am a man of distraction who never could get it straight.
And you left me thinking how odd of him
To even exist at all, he makes me feel
Strange and foreign here in this land.
Off we go to another dimension for solace and respect
For courage and neglect of self for
All the world a stranger and a useless scrap
Of memory that aspirates in the wind
And disappears down your throat
Like the diva’s song.
I am consequential in mysterious ways,
Not alone the bearer of import
But a sidekick to fate, your warrior in kind,
Your accuser in ways you thought safe.
In the parcel of history that is now
I am a lonely old poet knocking heads
With the ordinary.
