How jealous am I
At poetry?
That simple words make the lovely firm
And compact shadowy abstraction?
Every letter holds a bitter love
A fiction made with zeal,
Drawn from pinpricks, imaginings,
A fiction I made real.
Within them, sit, the cloth I weave
My heroic darling love exists
There, sobriety is leastways bearable
And pen to paper I can’t resist.
I see perfection—her complexion,
Written out in words
But she is so stolid
And doesn’t move
Her features fade when I admit,
Stale enterprise, the poem done
and the page I promptly quit.
Rife with guilt and melancholy
I’ve done impulse injustice:
Concretizing the unknowable,
Left caricatures incomplete.
Despite the sense, here, stacked before me,
The envy for this poem
Because it has a solid grasp
At the prickings of my heart.
And still, what have I
And what have he
But two-side written jealousy?
For more words that breed a love
Of which I, voracious, hunt,
More beauty, more glamour, rosy viscera,
Give poetry that fallacy,
That fallacy I want.