I Want My Work to Work

My poems, for instance, are not cream-filled candies
From France, meant to appease the sweet-toothed
Tip of the tongue with honeyed sway and nibbling
Shine of a novel chorus, caramel faces, mint-wreathed
Every brow -- though I will take some of the bitter
Variety, licorice lozenges, wormwood, the absence
Of decorous iris and lily-root, amaranth and coquillage
To castigate your parasols and sea-purpled chocolates:

The past is not a buffet, we are not to feast
On the sorrows of women like scrumptious
Frogs' legs, shelled snails, puffed up and stuffed
With tears, salted and deliberately savory
With death, and wounds, a bounty's cooked harvest
Of gore; the greatest artist does not cook up
Our delicious and saucy fate, mirrored for all time
In diamond goblets of Lethe wine, so the mind,
Inebriated with the intoxications of a supreme
Being unjust, can vomit this fond extravagance
Up into the malnourished bowels of memory, whose poetry
Is sputum. Someday a doctor will come along

And prescribe a strict diet of barely, ground
Wheat, something hard and close to the land
And its life-giving streams; tiramisu gives way
To lightly honeyed cakes, a visionary sip
Of wine, the fresh and ascetic taste
Of virtue. Books, like people, can corrupt --
All the more gluttonous shameful!
When Shakespeare can put a roof on the head
Of human penury, then to loquacious history
I'll bow my crown, and sing his glory.