Doggerel About the Genuine

A genuine poem,
as you indite it,
seems to sum up
your loose life behind it,
and promise a changed life
now and to come,
youth, love, beauty, power -
chaos now; kingdom come.

It’s delightful to write it,
reread it, revise it,
rewrite it, then type it
into Microsoft Word,
a tough cosmic loveliness
pulsing and rising
through grammar to beauty
beyond the absurd, hazy
intent of the poet
hell-drunk and heaven-sent,
syntatic transcendence,
God’s love in a phrase.

It quivers from the mouth
to the screen to the page,
a genuine poem;
it promises for ever
damn-, salv-, transformation
as it wilts on the page:

it is the poem that dies
as it blooms, age on age.