The Poet in Me

Conflict is the moment of the

troubled writer,

Frozen between the self

And the image,

That time when no poet can

Live up to the name,

And the struggle ensues

To force perfection

Upon imperfect words.

The writer tries to open

And feel

The natural syllabic

Progression of thought,

And feeling,

And knowledge.

The poet writes a tight rope

With no room for mistakes,

And no net

But failure.

The poet does not know.

He's fallen.

The poet refuses to

Acknowledge the failure,

But resides in rhetoric

Until the day

When he'll stare at that

Empty page

And wonder aloud,

"How fickle the muse!"

"How unfeeling the inspiration!"

He scribbles with no feeling,

No meaning,

An aching shadow of

The poet,

And becomes the prophet

Of profit.

The poet is the corpse of

A feeling,

Left to die,

To lie in the past

and proceeds.

The poet is thought, left in peace,

In mourning,

And a request

For understanding.

The poet is no lamp,

But shiny metal,

A soft reflection,

A soft repose.

The free spirit is a mirror

And grain of the seed,

As the acorn grows the oak tree,

As pride grows lies,

And ambition grows adversaries.

c. Nov 1993