Ars Poetica

Never trust in words --
oh never trust in pit-bull words
they only wait for lapses in control
To clamp you by the metaphor
and shake and shake and shake and shake
until the damned thing's only fit
for amputation

There's nothing quite so otiose
as throttling a stillborn thought
Ideas that were meant to spring
full-armoured from the godly brow
instead come scrabbling meanly
down the jugular like
mutilated gutter rats
and gnaw their way through fingertips
with scratching out and scratching out
on paper

That bloody pulp, the end result
just sits there staring back at you
and no more soars on angel wings
than garbage trucks or some such things
that rattle you from sleep at six a.m.

ah, may as well give up and start again.

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A particularly violent spell of writer's block?

This was written quite some time ago, so I'm not really sure where I was going with it. Seems like kind of a bizarre mix of horror movie and W.S. Gilbert now, though. With a title stolen from Horace thrown in for good measure...

Weird, yes.

But somehow, fairly amusing. To me at least.

And just for the record, I have no idea (today) why there's so little punctuation in the thing.