MELANCHOLY RAGE

Sonnet




It’s funny looking back. When I was young,
I thought I’d be a poet and turned out
Some six half-decent lyrics worth a shout,
A hundred which are better left unsung.
Rifled my brain for tropes, bells not yet rung
Anything to be read and talked about.
Then came the cold suspicion, icy doubt:
I lacked poetic passion. So I flung


My work away. Now, altered, old, and tired,
I footle in my verbal potting shed:
Ideas like bulbs and seedlings dry and dead,
Their germination date long, long expired.
Hot bilious anger's now my motivation,
Polemic doggerel its sublimation.