Where they want to go

You’ve dreamed up piquant phrases
that describe in fancy flavours
the atavistic phases of the moon,
or some such clutch of trashy clichés
you’ve imbued with painted life in
hope they might excite the limp, effete,
imagined connoisseurs of verse.

You’ve rummaged in your purse for
bottled compliments to dab about
yourself, the thick and pungent epithets
of grease and flattery you bought
with rancid thinking while copulating
freely with your cerebrum and lofting
animate and naughty thoughts.

It is complete, the words are tight
the rhyming neat, the meter and
the sound is right, it’s you in every
sense, exactly like the airy verse that
went before. You shove it out the door.
It bounces back in flames, this soulless
crap is worse than shit applied as salve

to wounded pride. So you start again.
This time your aim is less converse, the pain
within your chest is terse and to the point,
you write your verse to free the gravid clutching
at your heart and feel the easing of the strain,
the words are flowing once again, prepared
this time, to take you where they want to go.
© I.D. Carswell