Laureate (Reconsidered)

The Bard looks down on his stolen domain
And despairs.
This realm would be his but for the tenets
Of adequacy.
The once-fertile land has been debased
To a passionless kingdom, a dominion drained
Of wit and jarring emotional truth;
In their place: tawdry sentiments borrowed from
The Hallmark rack.
They handed his crown to a swamp-dwelling croaker,
A frog who eructs ragged kernels of corn,
Yellow dribs that sleet on us bus-riding folk--
We pick and flick the flakes off our scalps.
Can that be all? Please read it again.
What epiphany lurks in banal phrases,
Rhymeless, stagnant, pedestrian,
Ugly,
Wrynecked tributes?
Where is the clap of dramatic thunder,
Seeded by muses, spurred by afflatus,
Announcing the requisite apical shiver,
Secret of secrets, hidden pearl?
No insight emerges because it lacks
A revelation: the egg is empty,
The spawning's sterile, the birth's a void.
And so the impoverished fetus extends
A crabby claw
And throttles the Bard with all its might.