Tug Dumbly - Poem About Poems About Poetry

I dislike poems about poetry.

(Yet I’m writing one).

But you know what I mean?

All that stuff about images pegged out,

flapping like clothes on the line … etc. 

It’s all so self-basting

the craft forever disappearing

in wonderment

up its own precious fundament.  

I’m unkeen on rock songs about rock’n’roll too.

It’s something to do with the vacuity

of celebrating your own entity

all this self-referentiality,

this ourobouros circularity.

It somehow seems empty and sad  

like a building built 

just to house a building.

(For some odd reason

novels about novelists

don’t seem so bad).

Poets write poems about writing poems

like they’re copying out a recipe

rather than cooking it

and then moan about not being fed.

But bakers don’t bang on about baking bread,

they just get on and make it,

build a life stone by leavened stone,

with no one holding a gun to their head.

Their calling an alarm clock, their muse

an honest mortgage.

You want working on boy

Jake the poacher to Withnail asserts.

So put up or shut up

or find an honest line of work.