Emergency Poet

Emergency Poet 

It’s not easy being a poet you know

Sometimes your powers can wane

You start feeling the strain, as you bang out another refrain
I know it’s difficult to believe

As you see me here reciting my verse

But sometimes it feels like a curse

It’s easy to become rather terse

And when things start going really badly

It’s time for medical help, to call in the nurse

It started quite gradually for me, I noticed my verse was turning quite free

But the problem wasn’t obvious to see, I wondered what the hell it could be

My limericks were….lacking, my sonnets were….sickly

My ballads were… just bollocks, my couplets just wouldn’t couple

My quatrains came out queasy, and it was no longer so easy

Lyrics and haikus became mangled, my epics and epitaphs all entangled

My rhythms all rambling and strangled

It was then that I fell, into a villanelle from hell

I forgot all the parameters, for iambic pentameters

You should have seen, the state of my Alexandrine

Each sestina could have been keener, and my cadences cleaner

My metre was a mess, and soon I confess

That my long lyrical canto sounded like something from panto

I couldn’t carry on at that time, I’d lost my powers of rhyme

I’d finally arrived at the point to know it, I felt that I must owe it to myself

To call on the Emergency Poet….

So I called one night after nine…the number was… Line, Line, Line

After waiting with some frustration

I got through and had my consultation

She seemed to know the problem at once

Made me feel like a poetic dunce

She said I was over-tired and run down

No wonder I was rhyming like a clown!

To keep me from depression and wallowing

She prescribed treatments as following…

Starting with an exercise of blank verse, but nothing too taxing at first

My diet consisted of a little thin doggerel, to be written twice in each day
Then to try a quick clerihew, don’t mind if I do, just one or two

She said in this gentle mode, I could work up to an ode

Until some new verses flowed

Then she’d be willing to bet, I could manage a sestet

So the moral of this saga is clear:

If your stanzas turn queer, get treatment, don’t fear

Drink plenty of beer

And if you liked this saga – then give us cheer!

Copyright Andy Fawthrop 2015