here’s a poet who hears
voices, and it’s enough for him

here’s a poet who tried to vomit out
his soul because he doesn’t need it

here’s a poet pretending to be young, hands
in his pockets, hopelessly aged jargon

here’s a poet who wants to be a pilot
but he’ll be a poet because he reads while eating

here’s a poet werewolf, a poet only
by night, during the day a bookkeeper

here’s a poet who is clever because he knows
what to publish and what to discard

here’s an endlessly serious poet who does
the same thing and still constantly says: I don’t write much,

I carry lines around in my head a long time, and here’s
a poet who takes nothing to his heart?

here’s a poet romantic, who dedicates
his lines to waitresses and is easily moved to tears

here’s another poet, who washes his hands
and whistles softly as the closet bagpipe buzzes

here’s a poet glorifying nature as if
it needed his glorification

here’s a poet who hasn’t written a single
good line, but that doesn’t matter

here’s a fashionable poet with his retinue
secretly daydreaming about a scholarly career

here’s a poet intellectual, who all the while wanted
to be fashionable but did not succeed

here’s a poet naïf, who looks at what
he’s written and thanks The Almighty?

here’s a poet at his very best, two or three
days before he goes crazy

here’s a poet mystic, wringing
his neck in the cabala

here’s a poet in whose bathtub
is a poster of naked Marilyn Monroe

here’s a poet who doesn’t have Monroe or
a tub and washes in a bowl

here’s a poet driven into a corner, left
by a woman, left and afraid

here’s a poet, sacrificing his poem to metaphors
and here’s another, sacrificing metaphors to his poem

and here’s a poem, having sacrificed the poet, curly-haired
lamb, well in fact a whole sheep

a poem all alone:
the kind that’s enough for everyone.


© 2004 by Gintaras Grajauskas