The Parody of Poets
The world is charged parodies of poets
They will soon quit, like whiteheads winking open
They gather a greatness of rejection slips, like cat-lady gathers ringworm
And, outgrowing their angst and black jeans, get real jobs
Like marrying rich men and selling Mary-Kay
Or flipping burgers through grad school.
The world is smeared with trades of this kind—
And share ex-poets' smells and their soiled
sheets and dreams; nor can "The Writer" write, being
squelched for a nice desk-job.
But for all this, the phalse poet is never spent
But in his secret closets night-time finds a way
To scratch out verses of the sappiest feelings meant
And send then to poetry.com to display
Their closet art, under the pen-name "Dark Artist" and the like
And tho' their bosses and hubbies never know
That from them each nocturn new verse springs
And in them creativity's fart-fan continues to blow.
Sent as a joke to poetry.com, this poem is a parody of "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
