Dead poet
I’m sure it would be easier to survive as a dead poet,
I mean it in the surmise that I won’t be tempted
To revise or rewrite the poem I wrote last night, or the
Poems I wrote last week (which make me cringe when I
Read them again), or when I read poetry of way back then,
The poems of a pimply boy wracked in the paroxysms
Of youth, that I will not be not savaged by mortification,
Seized by towering rage, or patronymic patronism,
Or simply devastated by how far I’ve come
Without apparently moving an inch.
All the while I thought I was improving, faster to the
Interior rhyme, quicker to the slick rhythmic change
Of pace, the clever about face in the turning of a line,
The sublime ending. In the final rendering I am still
The same stationary, sole survivor, alive because I
Never really learned how to die.
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