Poet Poem by Don Pearson

(For Annabel Jones)

“She lies, arms enfolding her head,
Bewildered, half-dressed on the bed.
In a void that feels vast,
Eclipsed by the past,
All dreams of a future seem dead.”

You see the problem?
What sort of person
would even think about
writing a serious limerick?
All that emotion, the hopelessness,
the suffering, the pain.
I find writing poetry problematic.

It was Erato’s idea.
She is my Media Image Consultant,
just out of university,
very good at what she does,
hot as a Habanero chilli
and able to move in straight away.

Now I keep a writer
locked away at the extremity
of one of the corridors less travelled.
He is well looked after:
suitably half-starved,
without heat,
provided with candles.
I even introduced him to Erato
so that he could fall in love
and then be heartbroken
when I took her away.

It is win-win.
He is as happy as a dead seagull
and very productive.
I don’t need to write at all,
so I can concentrate on
BEING A POET.

Erato also introduced me to the poets’ toolkit, the 6 Ds: -
deranged, distracted, dishevelled, drunk, drugged and dead.
In various combinations,
they have been adopted with success,
by many poets.

I decided to concentrate on the first five.
I find it easy to appear
to be deranged,
happily muttering to myself
in a voice carefully modulated
to allow others to hear me.
I am told that my distracted look
is first class,
just right to convey the impression
that my mind is on higher things.
Erato buys my clothes
exclusively from charity shops
and my hair is expensively cut to look unkempt.
She supervises my intake of whisky
and opium before my appearances
so that each audience
can experience that frisson
that I will go ungentle on that good night
and BE OUTRAGEOUS (or die.)
They love it.

Being a poet is straightforward.
It was only the writing that was difficult.

6th April 2013