Poetry read at Table 3

This is one from my new collection, it was kind of an interesting little play on words - I'd just sent my wife e.e.cummings' "somewhere I've never travelled" and then the night later I needed to look up some Emily Dickenson to verify where one of my third-years had lifted a line, and this just popped into my head:


116.

I do not claim to be
anything like e.e.
(anyone lived in an
any
how
town)

and I would
not want to be –
similar to Emily(be-
cause I wouldn’t
prick,
at Death,
he kindly – pickled
- Me!)

And I don’t think it neat
to become like a Beat(chom
ping and swelling
on the blurbblurbblurb, hey now
get back there, whatchoo got on that
cheese?)

And I don’t have the rhythm or the
sound
to be an Eliot or Pound
(Into the salon the whistleblowers come
Damping their limpid Stygian hums.
The wine flows, into open jowels,
the bath of Dionysis
/‘she draughted i’tall, that vial
from the apothecary’
‘the one on Gladstone St.?’ ‘the very’
‘oh, yes, and what will the minister see
when he arrives home for tea?’/
all upflows into the belly of Isis.)

Oh,
I sup-
Pose,
after all
is said and done,(
and all these others’
time has come and gone
)that the type of poetry I
need to
be –

is simply the words that breathe from

me.