I have written a thousand poems for you
that have never left my room.
They fill the pages of notebooks stacked high on a shelf
no one can reach.
Orphans they are, beggars afraid they are not noble enough for the King,
would never make it past the guards.
I make a vain attempt to dress them up,
disguise their ridiculous origins, but still they smell bad.
There are times, late at night, however, when they think I’m asleep,
I can almost hear them talking to each other,
conjuring new ways to make it to your court.
Oh, the arguments they have! The barroom brawls!
Some of them actually think a shower and a shave is all they need.
Others insist on practicing, all night long, the perfect way of greeting you.
There is much to be said for these backroom bards,
these arm wrestling vagrants from another world.
Indeed, if I was dead,
my ambitious biographer, after paying his due respects
and asking permission of my dear, sweet wife,
would borrow them just long enough to search for pearls
and find the perfect turn of phrase, the verse,
the sudden storm of brilliance even my harshest critics would have to praise.
He’d think of clever titles for the tome, describing, in his carefully written way,
the “man who left his muse too soon”
or some such thing that might make you wonder
why I never gave these poems to you –
the one for whom it all makes sense even when it doesn’t.