Standard (EADGBE)

Oh where is your inflammatory writ

Your text that would inside a light be lit

Our music deserving devotion unswerving

Cried do I deserve her with unflagging fervour

Well no we do not if we cannot get over it

But what’s it mean when suddenly we’re spent tell me true

Ambition came and reared it’s head and went far from you

Even molluscs have weddings though solemn and leaden

But you dirge for the dead and take no jam on your bread

Just a supper of salt and a waltz through your empty bed

And all at once it came to me

And I wrote in hunch til 4:30

But that vestal light it burns out with the night

In spite of all the time that we spent on it

On one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet

While outside the wild boars root

Without bending a bough underfoot

Oh it breaks my heart I don’t know how they do it

So don’t ask me

And as for my inflammatory writ

I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit

Advice from the master derailed that disaster

He said hand that pen over to me poetaster

While ‘cross the great plains keening lovely and awful

You ulate the lost great American novels

An unlawful lot left to stutter and freeze floodlit

But at least they didn’t run to their undying credit