To  Henry Nightingale

I am a poet I am
Just a poet
The most pathetic and imprudent and reckless
and of course
I am poor and have no feelings of remorse
for one who reads these lines. For you.
Henry, come, look and read closer, I will give you a clue
of how badly I want you to dive in my rhymes
Each word giggles and rumbles and chimes
Each time you taste them on the tip of your tongue
Once the dot and the semicolon have even swung
After you licked your fingertip
And caressed with it the very sheet
Henry, my poem does unfold
as if the inky-paper buds
when you scrape off it all of the dust and mould
its lusty-typographic dripping turns to the floods
in a microcosm of a one snow-white A4 piece
taken from a Canary Wharf office by my caprice
I am a poet I am
As if from a novel -
Consumptive.
Vain.
Lewd.
Ungifted, dull and fickle
It is not me, but my words who prick up their ears
When you enter my studio and one of them hears
how the door squeaks. So they pester me with requests
to throw myself down and leave my poems as the bequests
Henry, I do not want any of this
They make me.
They force me.
They rape me and beg me and blackmail me
I am a pawn in their dirty and childish game
So when my rhymes will attack you, it's them you should blame
I am a poet I am
Lonely and only a poet
Not a proper one
Whose own words hold a gun
Close to his temple
While he comes undone
and all the commas and exclamation marks trample
on his typewriter. On their own.
And the poet has already known
that they have won