I don’t like the poems they’re making me write
I really don’t like them at all
Hierograffiti I don’t understand
Scrawled on a hologrammed wall.
They wake me up in the middle of the night
I really don’t like them one bit
Dictating mysterious messages
That I am forced to transmit.
Messages with strange metaphors, ass-
onance, similes and the like.
Internal rhymes that chime, and alas
External ones that sometimes don’t quite make it.
I don’t like the poems they filter through me
Using words I never would use
Like ‘filter’, ‘hierograffiti’, ‘alien’
I’m enslaved by an alien muse.
***
And I notice, just lately, at readings
That friends whose work I have known
Unknowingly have started to write
In a similarly haunted tone.
Stumbling over poems we have to recite
In handwriting that isn’t our own.