Talking Poetry Blues

I love poetry so much I just had to follow it
I followed it all around; let me tell you where all I follered

I follered through bad puns and a couple good ones
in good taste and bad taste and some not in any taste at all
I follered through tortured metaphor, through metaphor that talked
and through some that wouldn't even through water drip and solitary confinement
I follered through trite rhyme, cliche simile, through thoughts that were hard to express and quite a few that shoudn't even have been attempted
I follered through metered verse, blank verse and free verse
I even follered through numbers and codes, right up to the brink of absurdity
and even further than that
I follered up to the highest mountains and through the lowest swamps
and down to the river and under, I even gave it a kiss like it asked me

I jumped and I dodged my way through 997 love poems
and landed square on my feet in 986 tragic endings

When I got tired of follering, I decided to try my hand at some hard writing to show my girl Calliope how much I loved and was amused by her:
I wrote 33 sestinas, 27 haiku, 13 limericks, several odes, sonnets, and a whole lot of very serious poems that don't fit into formal description

I submitted 47 clever poems to the New Yorker, 62 cooking and decorating poems to Good Housekeeping, 12 rock and roll poems to Rolling Stone, 15 legal notice poems to my local paper, 55 nonsense poems to literary journals, magazines, clubs, departments, writing clubs, online poetry sites, friends, family and some people I didn't even know
and I got rejection letters from 365 editors' secretaries and even a few from publishers office custodians, though I can't figure how they found my letter.

I fell of my ladder at 66 poetry readings, talked to my feet at 45 more
I wrote a poem every day for a month, some of which were even tolerable
though many were not

I been up and I been down, I even tried moving to Paris, drinking absinthe and getting depressed for several months at a time
But even after all my work I couldn't get a scared off muse to come back and ease my fevered mind.