Dead Poet (rev)

 

I’m sure it would be easier to survive as a dead poet;
I mean it in the surmise I won’t be tempted to revise
or rewrite a poem I wrote last night, or poems I wrote
last week (which make me cringe when I read them
again), or reading poetry of way back then, poems
of a pimply boy wracked in the paroxysms of youth,
that I won’t be savaged by mortification, seized by
towering rage, patronymic patronism, devastated
by how far I’ve come apparently without simply
moving an inch.

All the while I thought I was improving, faster to the 
interior rhyme, quicker to the slick rhythmic change
of pace, the clever about face in the turning of a
line, wee dab of assonance, some slick alliteration,
the sublime ending. In the final rendering I am still
the same stationary, sole survivor, alive because I
never really learned how to die.
© I.D. Carswell