JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

When those floodgates open

they’ll surely be for me

my fingers marking time for years

my solace only drips and dribbles

tears and other nightly condensations

damp love letters to the gods of fame

 

Crumpled into frustrated balls

or drowned in vodka and cheap wine

abandoned phrases like cigarette stubs

flushed down the toilet of despair that come back

to mock me floating there like soggy stanzas

 in my mind - useless as tinder

 

Downstream colleagues pupils and

other furious fish splash through the shallows

as here and there one makes it to the open sea

flashing away to notoriety somewhere

across oceans of scribbling and waves

to America, the New York Times

Pushcart and Pulitzer

 

Their names up there in glistening lights

squelch slush and bravo to them what do I care

life’s an improbable mix of hydrogen two oxygen

and luck and in the end we’re all extinguished anyway

drowned decomposing in the silt at best a short-lived

celebration – flotsam and jetsam on an unread shore

 

So drink up my fellow flounderers

writing those love letters to the gods of fame

this round’s on me barman fill our glasses

closing time’s almost upon us

and who’s to say which one of us

may find his hiccupping way into a limerick’s lee