By Billy Collins (biography in Wikipedia)
The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night
--
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky --
the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more
poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank
more baby rabbits
hopping
out of their mothers into the dewy grass.
And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have
compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world.
and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit
with our hands folded on our desks.
Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind,
Poetry
fills me with sorrow,
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.
But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the
dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.
And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of
others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.
And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common
shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my
feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an
image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly
honest for a moment --
the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a
book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous
halls of high school.
