The Poet Takes All Morning

THE POET TAKES ALL MORNING

The poet takes all morning to wake up sometimes—
Sometimes days—sometimes weeks.
The poet eats too fast and asks for seconds.
The poet doesn’t know what he’s on about
But he knows there’s a word for it.

The poet doesn’t care
If I make any money,
If I eat things that are bad for me.
The poet believes that anything
Worth doing badly is worth describing well.
The poet wishes we would move to Italy,
That Death was Beauty, and Beauty, Truth.

The poet wants to throw a party
And invite his dreams,
Then go home with someone else.
The poet believes in Blakes’s God and Milton’s Satan
But can’t sit still for the pew religion—
He doesn’t understand why the hymns have to be so bad,
Why the sermon is never interesting,
Why no one weeps at communion.
The poet falls in love with every woman he meets
And loses them because he falls in love with every woman he meets.
The poet lies awake all night
Watching the dying animal sleep.

I’m a novelist, I complain to him—
I don’t have time for these endless moments.
The poet says I need a break from the words marching all the way to the right margin and back again trying to make something happen, never just letting time stop to be here now.
Maybe, I say.

The poet takes all morning to wake up sometimes.
Sometimes he wakes up right away.
The poet laments there are more hours in the day
Than there are things to do them.
The poet rides in the backseat asking,
Are we there yet? Are we there yet?
And before you know it, of course we are.
—Dennis Danvers

2 thoughts on “The Poet Takes All Morning

  1. How do you feel when you write? Is it like a release of concepts that well up and scream for escape? Or are you methodical about the way you construct ideas and shape them into multifaceted, multilayered interconnected matrices?

  2. Yes. Seriously, it’s a combination of the two. When the writing is going well, the words are much smarter than I am. I revise a lot, revisiting the scene often to get it “right” in a variety of ways, some of which, of course, I could have never have anticipated in the original conception.

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