Cautions For A Young Poet (Trying To Write In An Older Poet’s Style)

You really want to know?
Would you stand shoulder to
shoulder with Mary Angelou,
Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda?

Well then, what you’ve writ is,
in a word, …pretentious:

– too effete to
close the gap between
what’s real and
what’s pretend

– too tendentious,
lends fallacious airs
to icons badly jaded by
their self-indulgent friends

– too detached
for true reflection
of the light that gave
it birth;

in effect too much
the bastard child,
ego engineered
by sadly marred,
misguided work.

And it stands a barely
wilted jest – a parody
of what was meant but
never said, a council elect
of words selected for their
histrionic embeddedness,
beyond conscience or
cleverness teased out of
scarcely vested sources,
divorced from original
freshness, a derisory
deliberation, a schism
revealed in afterthought
as the incipience of your
paradigmatic cynicism.

And there it rests, patently not
amongst your very best; please,
don’t let it sully that!
© I.D. Carswell 2006