Poem: Poet Issues

 

Poet Issues

 

it was an orgy

of the anti-fantastic,

a spill out an 8th story window,

ideas as limp and lukewarm

as breathless doves.

 

it was a waterfall of useless hurt,

sheaves that meant so much less

than one line from a famous writer.

 

it was an example of what it didn’t take

to be more than a crumpled curl

in the city’s ego-heaped, petty gutters.

 

no one cares cares cares

 

for  my days drunk or sober,

sex-filled or sterile,

cried in extremes

from the bleeding mouth of a pen;

no one cares

for this savage agony of stormy bliss

chewed in the pincers of tiny rhymes.

 

cockroaches of cliché

crawl up my leg,

swelled brown as sewage,

their feelers ticklish over my heart;

 

yet when i scream, trapped,

it is only a blah of boredom 

as i stand cordoned in the same lines.

 

worse, i know

 

because my audience is as callous as i am,

whining about wanting to be heard,

trying to manage half-losing battles,

as if that is what life is all about--

a brutal tedium of that.

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8/14/24 light edits

10/11   "is" replaces "was" in the last stanza