Oh, where is your inflammatory writ?
Your text that would incite 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 you dirge for the dead and take no jam on your bread
Just a supper of salt and a waltz through your empty bed
And all at once it came to me
And I wrote him hunched 'till four-thirty
But that vestal light
It burns out with the night
In spite of all the time that we spend on it:
On one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet!
While outside the wild boars root
Without bending a bough underfoot
O it breaks my heart; I don't know how they do't
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, keening lovely & awful
Ululate 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.)