I’m afraid this is one of those self-indulgent pieces poets write when they can’t think of anything to write about; so they write about Poetry.  Most indulgently of all, they write about not being able to write about poetry.

I confess I too have fallen for this seduction.  My motivation, though, is a little unusual.

You see, my problem is that having written some of the finest lines of verse ever to come from Chapel Haddlesey, I feel anything I write further is just so much pap.

And I am not alone in this. Literati who follow my work have also noted that Shakespeare peaked with Hamlet and that his subsequent stuff was mere scribble.

Myself, I regret with a passion, for instance, penning of my adolescence the masterly

“I pined with unrequited love

(I’d never had a shag)

My heart hung heavy with chagrin,

My balls like saddlebags”

Or the delicate imagery I deployed in describing my sexual attraction to the underarm hair of that captivating East German athlete, Heike Drechsler,

“The icing on my cake though it’s

The vegetation of her pits;

As though beneath the wings of swans

Were two small rodents clinging on”.

You see my difficulty?