Now I'm in the turnips and string beans of poetry:
It's like, you think you'll grow up some day
And live in a two story house with swimming pool,
And a two car garage, with a six pack driveway.
Things turn out differently, though you might think
You'd spend whole days devouring Dickinson, Keats, and Shelley,
Drinking fine wines with tidbits of exotic cheese.

Then you find out you'll live in a one car rented garage apartment,
Over a couple always yelling or making love-
There's no in-between; and you never know which it'll be
And if you're mistaken for the significant other you might get
Bopped with a lady's spiked heel or an army boot.

Then you find out that you're the couple
But you're always too busy to make love;
Love is no longer scheduled like bowling night,
It all depends on uncluttered horizontal surfaces and spare minutes-
And the wine turns into beer, when you can afford it
And the nightly budget pizza is the only dough you'll get
It's constipating; but the words still get squeezed out.

And the poets you're reading now aren't dead:
They're urbanely unkempt, and you know them personally,
All their quirky habits; writing poems at bus stops
In a voluble rush; writing words on cafe napkins,
On discarded want ads and torn paper sacks;
And none of them are well known, and none of them are rich.

But they're poets all the same, they live and breathe
The written word, and you're no different, certainly no better,
All of you shooting up words and slang nightly,
Weighing out the soul of the latest idiom,
Choking on cheap cigar smoke and wishing you'd written that,
And thinking you could have done it worse-
And suddenly some night, you look around you

You realize you're living poetry, and you don't care anymore
About rich and famous- because now it's your addiction;
None of that mattered anyway, for only poetry holds any reality now.
Everything else is imaginary, and all the poets started out this way;
Nobody knew them or gave a rat's ***,
And they went on writing just the same
As if it were the most important job on earth they'd been given.