Every once in a while i pull up a poem i wrote a number of years ago. It sort of puts me in my place and then revives a passion i think i have always had and always will have. i do not know why. i’m not particularly good at writing. My grammar is often shaky. i often break the rules. My editing is terrible. I sometimes get “smarmy” as Sharry Baird Hager once desribed my writing. And i can get on a roll and go over the top, writing what i really didn’t mean to write.

So i can get frustrated, swear i’m going to give it up, decide there are better, more productive things to do, declare i don’t have any desire to be published, and on, and on, and on…

Then i run across this poem again and realize i ain’t gonna quit. i don’t know why.

Dreams and Innisfree

Mr. Yeats, that revolutionary son of a bitch,
wrote of the Isle of Innisfree,
creating yet another dream for me,
which i did not need for
i have dreamed all my life;
it’s time to put aside such distractions.

tomorrow, i will meet a young woman,
not needing some dreamer to interfere;
we will converse, enjoy our time
discussing possibilities
in the ambience of the avant garde eatery:
she will go away again,
forging her own path.

i will go home to
play my role,
subjugating my dreams;
it is time i gave up dreaming,
but
then that ole sum bitch Yeats
tempts me with Innisfree:

I will succumb and dream again.