Two roads diverged in a wood and I
I took the wrong damned road
See why do I do that
Why do I indulge that nasty habit
Of self-condemnation

When I an old man
Think back on my life
My unimpressive life
All that ever come to mind
Are the poor choices I have made

But see that’s not true in so many ways
Take for example the choice
To which I secretly refer
Namely my choice to regard poetry
As the expression of feeling

Certainly it was other than
One momentous choice
And more a matter of having lived through
The swinging sixties the sordid seventies
And the deconstructive eighties

And who’s to say the choice was wrong
If choice it was
And the error if any was that of sweeping generalization
A serious error to be sure
And one to which I am particularly prone

Because with me it’s always
With me it’s always
And all that ever
And indulge that nasty habit
And sin and error and poor choices and self-condemnation

I condemn myself for condemning myself
And in what sense is any of this poetry
Well from Wordsworth I learned to recollect emotion
From Dickinson I learned to imagine myself
And from Whitman I learned that myself might be song

And from Milton that myself am hell
And from Baudelaire Rimbaud Yeats Dylan and Hendrix
That madness could be method
I prayed for madness
And you see that madness came

But from Keats
Ah poor blessed sane Keats
I learned the miracle of epithet
That indolence could be honey’d
And the wings of poesy viewless

And my poems
For so I have insisted upon calling them
Became infested with cliches
Of sin and condemnation
But at least my cliches could be tawdry

The sickly confessional mode
The enfeebled habit of self-absorption
And hence of self-contempt
And adjectival insistence
From which I banish clarity action and image

Uh but only for the most part dude
I always sweepingly generalize har
And in general a poem begins in feeling
None more fecund than lamentation
Available we hope for rational inspection