On Poetry

A poet without a pen,

A quill without the ink;

Yet time and time again I’ll try

To build the bridges from my head, I think

I’m hopeless. A lost cause.

A ship destined to sink,

A dying man’s final pause.

A broken bottle sent to bear

Love-letters, no better way

To waste my final words

Than stuttering an utterly unconvincing

Message of pseudo-intellectual

Hopelessness.

Inspired with no inspiration,

Head swarming with thoughts,

But no net or better yet the concentration

To catch them; write their nectar into beauty.

A crying man’s tears don’t make a tragedy

And a dying man’s final words don’t make an obituary.

Just a tongue-tied man trying to talk in the forms

And bring them back to paper;

Draining dregs of ideas from a keg of concepts

Left to lie in mortal feelings of frustration.

Being a poet is the slow acceptance of mortality,

Being human is pretending that’s a lie.

Lines torn from my mind;

A different person left behind each time,

A former version of myself shed like snake skin.

Waking where a previous incarnation lay,

Each day drilling deeper in my mind

To find thoughts to spread like butter on my empty page;

An age spent searching, a life spent waiting

For that elusive perfection to hit me.

Creating trails of torn up paper in my path

I crawl on, surfing on enjambment to a blistered next step.

But rounding up footprints and finding their feet

I know that I’m six lines

From bliss. And poetry is

Making madness from the trails of ideas

That raced on leaving just tyre tracks behind.

Spelling out from burnt rubber in your mind

And moulding the mess into a sentence.

Crawling on and dispensing beauty in your wake.

For God’s sake, it’s beautiful.

You’re beautiful.