5
All poets have good days and bad.
On the bad ones, words flop about
like asphyxiating fish lifted
violently from their native water,
like a luckless poet's dimwit hope
that he could breathe quite as well on land
if only there was an empty page
instead of one more anoxic puddle in which to land.
Well, say I, land, then. Land someplace scaly, thin, and silver
and oh-so-quite way alien,
rather than life falsify, again,
again, again, again.
All poets have good days and bad.
On the bad ones, words flop about
like asphyxiating fish lifted
violently from their native water,
like a luckless poet's dimwit hope
that he could breathe quite as well on land
if only there was an empty page
instead of one more anoxic puddle in which to land.
Well, say I, land, then. Land someplace scaly, thin, and silver
and oh-so-quite way alien,
rather than life falsify, again,
again, again, again.