I Perpetrate a Poem

Some years ago, after I decided that most of us should read more poetry and write less, I threw away all the notebooks full of my poetry, and I've been pretty good about not writing any more poetry. In fact, in the past nine years, this is only my second slip-up.

You can read my most most successful and widely published poem, an eight-word, ten-syllable haiku here. Yes, ten syllables, one line. Some day, I'll get around to writing an article, "Haiku: When Seventeen Syllables Are Eighteen Too Many." So, to make amends, you can find a fantastic poetry site (here). Visit it, read and weep.

For now, weakened by being battered by so many National Poetry Month offerings here on AC, I offer "National Poetry Month: A Hangover."

Poet, why aren't you peering through the smoke
of a Gallois, held, continental-style,
underhand, as you hold your fork,
when you dally with your unicorn steak tartare?

Apollo's flute is not available, so
Billie, Sassy Sarah, or Monk, pounding the keyboard,
must suffice: no scratchy old LPs, but a CD -
MP3s, downloaded from an Internet pirate site - will do,
something to accentuate the pain, the pain,
the pain beyond Prozac or Viagra.

Your drink? California jug wine, of course,
poured into a Beaujolais bottle kept for such occasions,
the price, the mask of transformation.

If poets wore ties,
yours would be a stained Countess Mara
your grandfather threw out when he downsized
to a condo and a younger wife,
your blazer with a missing button
(that's worth an ode),
an oxford shirt, unbuttoned,
a gray teeshirt underneath,
or, would you button the shirt
and wear the teeshirt over it?
You are, after all, a poet.
Should your teeshirt have a slogan?
What slogan is worthy of a poet?

Faded jeans - natch -
Loafers? Who still wears loafers?
Without socks or with argyles?

But, back to those eyes -
under your Mohawk 'do,
honestly gray -
you watch too much television,
posting to an Internet forum in ALL CAPS,
only taking calls from the answering machine.
You must be very angry to seem so calm.

Have you missed an episode of American Idol this season?
Do you still stop parties with your memory
of the first time you heard Simon and Garfunkel,
and, how long it was until you could remember
who was who? And now, Paul Simon Cowell...
Paul Ringo George John...
John Paul one or two, pope or naval hero...
Being a poet ain't easy.

Dylan Thomas's unanswered question -
Is it essential to be homosexual
to write love poems to beautiful women?
Or to judge a beauty contest?

Eliot was lucky: Anglo-Catholicism was an option,
before there were guitars in the choir loft,
Anglo-Catholicism and monarchism were possible.
Would Old Possum have ended up a Reagan Republican?
But he was right: April is the cruellest month.
Because of tax day... or poetry month?

Ginsberg ruined Buddhism for everyone.
What's left? The way of the Sikh or the Jain?

No twenty books in black or red for you,
as you hide from April's sweet showers,
just PDFs on your harddrive.
Madam Sosostris, still wise,
traded her cards for Tarot software.

No poet has ever needed a month,
just a moment between sunset and night,
before the dead have started to walk,
but are already full of power,
like an arrow, before the archer
releases the string.