Improv - Rodney Jones, "A Defense of Poetry"

i could write my drinking buddies our ars poetica
but it'd be about a Scottish broad's backside and
some fancy ditty-name for ackerdimmicks to use
eventually.

if poetry is the confined, the fairy-in-a-bottle moments
of Shakespeare then i'd say all are punished
made to toil in the muck by a god content
with defeat.

my poems are
vaudeville in a shrink's couch,
a white coat syndrome trembling
around the dotted line.
here here here here
comes the truth:


the works of these hands;
the silk that swelled to clouds?
just thatched-mud dresses
in your bright, wide eyes.