Poetry

Tangled thoughts litter my mind
Strewn about like so many discarded corpses
Forgotten by the bone yard wagon
Dusty mockeries of conscientious ideas
Once bursting with the promise of life
Now they lie as still and dead as marble slabs
Inert to the perpetual shifting change of the world outside
Their ragged garments of logic stirred now and then
Only by the deathly breath of my feeble attempts at creation
My mind has become a graveyard
A cess pit of incompetence wherein the god of poetry sits
On his knees in the morass of my inspiration
Shaking his head in contempt at the folly of my failings
You are no poet he declares
In the omnipotent sonorous voice of God
You are a pretender and all your vainglorious attempts
To steal my poetic crown are pathetically
Perpetually disappointing
And yet I do not stop
I stride bravely through the cemetery of my muses
Kicking at their tombstones to stir the slumbering skeletons within
I shout into the grimy dark sky of my psyche
Rouse yourselves contemptible words and come to my bidding
Spring to the tips of my fingers like Cupid’s faithful arrows
And help me - god help me - express the futility of my soul
And the masochistic tendencies of the fragile human condition
And when you are done
And the ink still glistens on newly ejected pages
Leave me to sleep in the wake of my bitter façade of success
Let me be here in this graveyard of dreams
And let me sleep the open-eyed sleep of never-ending unconsciousness