I Want My Work to Work (R1)

My poems, for instance, are not cream-filled confections
From France, meant to appease the sweet-toothed
Tip of the tongue with honeyed sway and the nibbling
Shine of a novel chorus, caramel faces, mint-wreathed
Every brow -- though I will take some of the bitter
Variety, licorice lozenge, wormwood, the absence
Of decorous iris and lily-root, amaranth and coquillage
To castigate your parasols, 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
Into wounds -- and salted, deliberately savory
With tears, a cooked bounty's harvest
Of delicate gore; the great artist doesn't serve up
Our delicious and saucy fate, mirrored for all time
In glozing decanters of Lethe wine, so that the mind,
Inebriated with intoxication 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

And prescribe a ground diet of barely, chafed
Wheat, something hard and close to the rock
And its life-giving streams -- change tiramisu
For bee-dripping lees, a visionary sip
Of wine, the flesh and ascetic taste
Of pleasure. For books, like people, corrupt:
All the more gluttonous shame!
When Shakespeare roofs the human head
Of penury, I'll wrap my crown in loquacious
History, and squint wide-eyed at his glory.