His poem won’t come.
No — it simply won’t come!
He squeezes and he squeezes…
And it still won’t come.
Sure; sometimes he doesn’t even try.
He doesn’t even squeeze.
Too busy wi’ shit for that.
He expects poems to infest his brain
And demand total attention.
To be born fully-formed,
Then simply notated.
And sometimes he’s so lazy…
So fucking lazy!
And even when special lines
Do take control of his brain,
He still doesn’t work on them.
Too busy wi’ shit for that.
Poetry is hard work -
Or at least it can be.
Creating good lines is tiring.
Brains eat up energy
Like limbs digging graves.
Poems must be sculpted.
Words put in their right place.
If Dylan Thomas spent a long month
On a solitary line,
Then surely no poem’s ever born whole -
With all its limbs in the right place.
Yes; some poems get squeezed out… slowly -
Like babies who don’t want to be born.
Mythic inspiration is rare -
It doesn’t always come a-knocking.
So he must use some force.
He must contrive things.
Make the mundane dramatic.
He must grind and sweat a little.
© Paul Austin Murphy 2021
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