Meta Block

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

That’s a very long week of more tomorrows

And the very occasional mixed metaphor

What’s a meta for if you can’t go mixing it

Like Robert De Niro and the angry mailman

Slugging that key board in your Hemingway

Or just Fred a staring at it Fitzgerald style 

The drinking death and that furious sorrow

Liquidity cloaks the author’s tomorrow

The writer’s demise, a vain glorious full stop

No more Ezra pounding on the qwertyuiop

(Be grateful for that small and tender mercy

He’s a bimbo from limbo, pickpocketing Rimbaud)

Hearses and black horses on the ole clip clop

Isn’t that just the streetcar of a dark desire

Even Blake’s burning bow can’t rival that

Crucifying the day could be your Jerusalem

With a career in passionate travel writing

Or be an idiot who can’t spell Dostoevsky

And let the punishment fit your awful crime

(Banishment to that whimpering Wasteland

Reading Charles Dickens, Waugh and Peace style)

For being a slow and feckless plagiarist

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of plagiarism

That an innocent audience wouldn’t pay for

Start gathering your rose buds while ye may

Orson and Shakespeare have written your play

And Marlowe’ s ghost will collect you later

Each soul’s so well read it’s literally frightening

How’s an honest plagiarist to make a living

Being the last poor writer on the block

When the executioners face is still so well hidden?

It’s alright if you’re Shakespeare or Bob Dylan

What can a poor boy do to make a dishonest coin

When words refuse to flow like wine or holy water

An’ inspiration’s a noun hiding from an author

An’ the verb’s eloped with the iambic pentameter

All you’ve got left is some very novel grammar

So get very drunk or possibly worse get sober

And conceal your genius until it’s tomorrow

That’s a lot of tomorrows, three more than Macbeth.

One less than creation. And an M short of cremation

Makes you wonder if a writer’s life is a typing error

Or even better: one big happy spelling mistaker.