Second Edit: To Emerging Poets

[Richard]

To Emerging Poets

This is your place: another blackout drunk,
mouth dry of metaphors,
eyes bloodshot and sensitive.

This is your place: buried beneath words,
quiet as lilies by a gravestone.
A piece of you left for dead on a page.

This is your place: far from the head table,
hidden in the coat check,
wine anesthetic against applause.

This is your place: hungover,
trembling hand holds cheap pen
only to steady while writing.

First Edit:

To Emerging Poets

This is your place: blackout drunk,
mouth dry with metaphors,
eyes bloodshot and sensitive to streetlights
that flicker like self-alleged genius.

This is your place: hidden beneath words,
quiet as flowers by a gravestone.
A piece of you left on a page,
some small part of imagined grandeur.

This is your place: far from the head table,
speeches describing their contributions,
wine sweeter than anesthetic, applause louder
than dead poets, who rot like everyone else.


Original:
To Emerging Poets

This is your place, hidden beneath words
that sit quietly like flowers
atop a gravestone,
bulky with an extended epitaph.
Of course, you were just drunk.
Eyes bloodshot from blacking out,
mouth dry from metaphor,
one hand stained, while the other
is clean as unused paper.

This is your place, a piece of you
resting between pages, stiff, dry,
small part of something grander,
missed the moment it fell out.
Your skin becomes sensitive to breezes,
fingers desperate to know any touch,
brain imagines ironies where others
see only what is there.

This is your place, reserved at the head table,
speeches describing your contribution,
wine sweet as anesthetic, applause louder
than a mother comforting her dead son.