The old bad feelings
Which in my delusion
My wishful groundless hope
I thought I had overcome
Have returned

Too cowardly for pessimism
Too scared for despair
To face a future
In which I and those I love
Will suffer

But chiefly I
In narcissistic self-regard
A comfortable burgher
Counting his wounds
Luxuriating in regret

A liar and a plagiarist
Once I claimed that
Fair trains of imagery rise
But I have no imagination
No ability to produce images

The claim is Wordsworth’s
Word for word and not my own
No imagination
But only strategies
Of compensation

I have no imagination
But I have a great vocabulary
And yet I did not think to employ
The word trains
Much less the word fair

My imagination is auditory
I have told myself
But the sounds are no richer
Than the sights
No rhyme no rhythm no resonance

I fail to recollect emotion in tranquility
Due to a lack of tranquility
So I have protested
When only the throes
Stimulate my composing

A great poet
Finds fit epithet
A phrase of Keats
Even for despair
And seems it rich to die

Why then the compulsion
To compose
To congratulate myself
To simulate greatness
Without the risk of publishing

Discovered after death
Dickinsonlike
Or maybe these postings
Will make a splash
But poems don’t go viral

And how can these lines
Of unpunctuated prose
These pellets
Ever qualify
As a poem

It’s not poetry
It’s just a stupid symptom
Diarrhea or a flow of pus
A defect a stain
It’s snot poetry