What Makes Famous Poems.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’m actually proud of this piece, for once. 😀

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What Makes Famous Poems.

Sitting on a rickety chair,
My frustration multiplied
By the constant escape of
Those fickle devils-
Words-
From my mind’s hungry lair.

‘What makes famous poems?’
I wondered,
‘Surely it was, for one,
A myriad of thoughts
That no one,
Except the poet,
Would care about enough
To ponder.’

It was surely
The way they’d tempt us
With bodacious fair maidens
And the same ol’
Mystical island of yore.

It was the way
They’d entice us
With comfort that
We were seeking.
Lace it in their
Sonnets and limericks and haikus,
Like they knew
What’d exactly
Stop our grieving.

It was,
Not to forget,
That they were
The First Ones
To write words,
To write beauty
With a harmonic end
On the topic they chose,
And the pictures
They had painted of
Objets d’art
Would be eternally
Their own.

The majority of inspiration
(And only that, nothing more!)
Would be frowned upon, thereafter,
As plagiarism;
Cast away, to return,
To quoth the Raven,
“Nevermore.”

So, to be me
And be born in the
21st century
Is a curse.
The very best of ideas
Seem to be all taken
And lovingly fed with words.

Now, I grow desperate
(And though begrudgingly,
I admit- unreasonable),
Wary of cursing
Ms. Plath, Cummings, Poe
Ms. Dickinson, Whitman
And ‘course,
Shakespeare!

For, they were
The First Ones,
Their poems embalmed evermore.
I forget all the pleasure
They’d given me
Once
Or twice
Or thrice,
For now,
They and some others along their line,
They are taking from me
The chances of getting
On a plane to Cambridge,
The very opposite of near.

-Kimaya Ingale.