Dead poet (rev)

I’m sure it would be easier to survive
as a dead poet; I mean it in the surmise
that I wouldn’t be tempted to revise
or rewrite the poem I wrote last night.

Or the poems I wrote last week which
make me cringe when I read them again,
or when I read the poems of a pimply boy
wracked in the paroxysms of youth –

I will not be seized by mortification, savaged
by towering rage or patronymic patronism,
or simply devastated by how far I’ve come
without apparently 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, the sublime ending.

In the final rendering I am still
the same stationary survivor,
alive because I never really
learned how to die.
© 1 July 2007, I.D. Carswell

Rhetorical Thirst (rev)

(Formerly - Falling For The Trap (of his own rhetorical thirst))

Felled by the ward of his intransigence,
levelled and laid flat, sword brandished
in denial – sword wafting words uttered
emphatically in a trial of words by wards,
falling for the trap of his own rhetorical
thirst, falling into the gap between those
who run first and those who carp and cry
in the pack – an empty husk cracked
and ablated, an old fool utterly trashed.

He rises from the refuse pile and smiles
awkwardly; the weight of years is erased
in a cloak of discarded peel and wilted
lettuce leaf, feels a freedom beckoning,
steals a glance at the husk in recycled
livery of an unnatural trance, shakes his
tangled hair, shambles from a grave of
arrogance – there’s still room out there
for an old stager – somewhere?
© 31 January 2007, I.D. Carswell