by Brett Rutherford
Who can be a poet all the time?
The sons of rich fathers,
remittance men —
spinster heiresses with hyacinth hair,
filling long sheets with
delicate verse —
the wrinkled don retired at last
to his monument of sonnets —
the very young — the truly mad —
the Muse-possessed
(not just visited, inhabited
by the poem-urge) —
But for the rest of us,
being a poet
is at best an illusion,
at worst a vice.
A thing of glory, certainly.
Honor or profit?
not in this age!
Against those professionals,
we migrant poets must distill
into a hundred poems,
the brandy of their thousands,
lift up our frail mimosa leaves
beneath their sky-
consuming oaks.
Vast tomes they fill,
prose interrupted
by spasms of the ENTER key,
or blocks of text
that seem the stuff of Bedlam.
They are at it, day and night.
The mail truck groans
with their outgoing manuscripts.
They teach this stuff.
Honest to God, they are paid to do it!
They sniff at one
another’s résumés.
Their blurbs adorn
one other’s jackets.
They are weighted down with medals.
If you sleep with one,
you can be a contest-winner!
Young rivals beware:
they trample their peers,
for something called “tenure.”
The rest of us
must steal these hours,
scrawl debtors’ ink
on dime-store paper,
consort with the Muse
as though adulterous,
secret as those frenzies
in the alleys of Sodom
between the angels
and the damned.
In the anvil world we live in
we are impractical, slothful,
lounging for adjectives
when we should be “working,”
shouting our newfound lines
against the surf,
to the dead in graveyards,
to the indifferent grackles
on our window ledge —
absolutely useless, this
rootless, anti-
Puritan-ethic obsession —
Except that for these moments,
freely given,
we would nothing trade,
knowing that those who follow us
would forfeit fortunes, too,
for such a poetic seizure,
would trade a life of ease
for a mouthful of words,
the words that come as though
a thunder-god had uttered them.
—Revised 2026
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