Poetic Development, A Self-Portrait

He was a mean little poop,

hard, hoarded, costive,

a small, colorless, misgiven shit,

i.e., a fart,

seeping forth only as gasses,

the essence of this anti-stanza.

We felt that had he been vegetarian,

instead of this meat-eating, slut-seeking,

feeble farce, expectorating contra-poetry,

he might have become a high-flying word gazelle,

clean-fecalled and Keatsish, dead young, rather.

So we tried to cure The Epicurean,

but there was something vile about him,

prone to thick adjectives

and perseveration in abstraction, something

lying ostentatiously, even in self-flagellation,

right at the very verbal heart of him.

We got him a rub-down with camphor oil,

put on a clean night-shirt and sent him to bed.

He sleep-walked, swallowed a pound of bacon raw

and went after the masseuse.

The next day we had him write letters to his mother.

He used short sentences with words like meek,

but rhymed them for coarse emphasis: weak.

He threw games but bet against himself,

took in several dogs and budgies; ate them all.

We consulted another dietitian.

She powdered and peppered his insides with spices,

plopping him once again into a sweet sleep;

he awoke from that to find himself in India,

unrepentant.

We hired a quartet of harlots to tickle him

with low-voltage around the ass,

shove sausage down his throat

and jerk him off,

all the while reading rhyming verse.

He liked it,

started using big adverbs to say how much,

descended into poor puns and relished these too.

What a pickle!

Then he brought up the whole, greasy, acid, illicit mess

and reworked it repeatedly, painstakingly.