I am here at all hours of the day and night, on this miserable rocky outcrop, beneath the blistering high sun of mid-day or the merciless, needling winds of darkness, wrestling, always wrestling, with my rhyming dictionary. I thumb it. I toss it about. I rend it and I squeeze it. From time to time I even peek into it. All to no avail. Such are the extreme limitations of a rhyming dictionary when conversation is so limited.
The last helicopter drop from that blackguardly mainland brought me Babette Deutsch's Poetry Handbook, somewhat battered by its fall from the clouds, somewhat soddened by the fact that it had to be gathered from the sea with the aid of Bartholomeus's old keep net, the one he could never quite relinquish…
Here are the miserable firstfruits of the early morning hours. Why must I wake so early to the insistent drumming rhythms of rising inspiration? Why must my ear be perpetually put out of joint by the heartless bellowing of female dolphins?
Letter from Patmos
My pen was dead. My pen is alive again.
I wake in the midst of a
Blakean vision
Of seven naked light bulbs.
I drop a light bulb. It
shatters into shivers,
Even as I myself am shattered
into shivers
By the supernal wrath of the
long-distance
Creative writing tutor.
I am wearing the crown of life,
awkwardly.
I am wielding the double-edged
sword, limply.
I will fight against my infirmities
with the sword of the pen.
I have not yet found my works
perfect before man.
I know myself to be poor,
miserable, wretched, blind, naked
And florid in the extreme.
I must hold fast until help
comes falling from the air.
It may yet soon come.
This is the extent of my
burden.
I write to you from the Island
of Patmos
Amidst fleas, imported
foodstuffs,
And a chastened remnant of
sickly eremites,
Illiterate to a man.
Having just re-read these pitiful lines, so long laboured over, I am now heartily retching into a part-shattered amphora that was lately washed in from the shores of the Lebanon.
The Lebanese, godless or not, have their uses.