You, my friend, have a lot on your plate.
Have you the gravitas? Can you bear the weight
of a life’s summation?
Can you detain the fleeting muse?
With quiet courage relay the sad news
to the waiting nation?
Or are you just another patch
on the quilt? Another nervous scratch
on the poetry table?
Spare me the guilt of a commission,
a bar mitzvah or an ad for television.
Always too available.
An epithalamium for someone distantly related?
A heartfelt elegy, redrafted and updated?
A haiku sent by text?
The birthday greeting dashed off on a train?
The consolation, fleeting and vain,
that your best poem will be the next?
A nonsense verse to fill an empty page?
Something about a teapot in a cage?
The Hairbrush and the Tortoise?
Or are you unfinished? Manuscript on the floor.
Pen prised from a demented claw
frozen in rigor mortis?
Don’t worry, final poem, you’re not on
the last leg of a relay race carrying the baton,
the prize within your grasp.
There are no prizes, laurels turn to dust.
So let’s keep it simple, you’re just
my final poem, my last gasp.