i've learnt that the greatest
prompt and subsequent
impromptu to yet another poem
is to be constantly dissatisfied
with one's output,
because there's hardly a solemn
care for so little with so much
intent: prose writers are due
respect for hammering
so many little and big words into
novels with an odd flash of
poetic genius, poets are always
left dissatisfied because of this,
their open-plan scribbles are
the compensation odes to the bulk
of bulging plotted out scenarios
of fiction - i too wish i had the
capacity to write so much, bound
by 21 volumes of a Dickens or a Balzac,
but whereas they have their endless
stream of words and compensate
very little in terms of poetic economics,
i can:

                              do this


    do that

                                             and revel

    in the blank trimmings

                                             of a rim


    of a canvas:                    
                                                 with each dispute

    the white, the snow

                                            grin of defeat;

or like the chinese poets said: haiku yin-yang

                 the poem must be,

                     less mechanism of anything,

more association of mechanisms as you elsewhere;


      well less art more ****: make each poem

a yin-yang assimilation - x-ray the renaissance paintings

    and the impressionists, and the still-life

painters and the cubists and realists and the pre-raphaelites...