A POET’S LIFE
His universe cracks like an eggshell
and he pops out of the crust
like a stripper from a cake,
a phoenix from its pyre.
On fire with words, he’s the worst
and best battling on a darkling plain.
Then he’s Shanghaied away from shore
and what he as a human being can bear.
He escapes during a storm, makes land,
and crawls down a cave to Middle Earth.
He wrestles the Midgard Serpent,
Fenris the Wolf, finally Old Bones himself,
but sells his soul to slink back alive.
Next, he sneaks to the other side
of the tracks, drapes his elbow across a rail
in front of an onrushing freight, then stumbles on
waving the bloody stump like a flag,
still believing in everything and nothing,
having never lived inbetween anything;
having always stuffed the too-skinny present
with Way-out-there or Way-back-then.
Then he slips through the meager rupture of Now
into whatever rapture poets earn for their trouble.