(With apologies to Poet Dom Moraes)
I
Glad to meet you, poet born to somebody,
Cheeky jowls, languid hair, and plump of body,
With glasses slipping down your nose,
A receding chin and lips as a wilted rose.
Alright, you lived for poetry and prose,
A life sacrificed at the altar lachrymose,
You married beautiful women and left them,
Because, bored of them you soon became.
You were anointed; you were God’s child,
Your verses were mellow, but were angst filled,
The pages of history’s sinister happening,
You chronicled without a sigh or sorrowing.
They called you a promising child prodigy,
It’s so sad your life ended in tragedy,
Writing in flawless iambic pentameter,
While drinking liquor in bottles by the litre.
Though your life was troubled, t’was not bad,
I know of unread poets who have gone mad,
You confidently walked the road of fame,
Nobody said an unkind word, or, of shame.
The world in which you travelled and wrote,
These days is full of show and self-promote,
Today poetry slammers face audience in anger,
In their minds no any compassion linger.
II
Now, please, meet Mr. John Nobody,
Writer of vain and vapid prosody,
Bearer of considerable self-inflicted pain,
Singer of many a rock-star-poets’ refrain.
He is a poet of utter nothingness,
Prone to long bouts of carelessness,
He writes poems that no one publishes,
To save him from ignominy and the blushes.
Once in a while he makes a few submissions,
Which come back replete with outright rejections,
How then would he make a poet’s pre-eminence,
Before he reaches his state of senescence.
In writers’ fora he has tarried too much,
Closed poetry circles he tried vainly to breach,
But the bitch goddess wouldn’t post a smiley,
On his attempt to essay metaphor and simile.
John Nobody thinks there was life on Mars,
And it self-destructed in a few millennial years,
Likewise life here on earth is not eternal,
It’s only a few years from an atomic infernal.
So, John Nobody doesn’t mind much the anonymity,
He constantly absents from events with regularity,
When he dies, he says, don’t grieve, instead, drink Moet,
On his grave write, “He doesn’t mind being re-born a poet.”
