234. Poet for Hire

There’s a poet for hire on Bourbon Street
Who will write you a song if you give him a beat
With his typewriter standing on wobbly stilts
Through the holes in his gloves and the laze in his lilt
As he burps and he rubs his bulbuous nose
And tap-dances drunkenly onto your toes
But he’ll knock out a sonnet if you give him a rhyme
Or a sip of the lime with tequila refined
Or a snuff of the snow, a buzz of the blow
Which he can use to bring himself high from the low
For poetry is the superior form
And he is a master of penning the porm
(A distasteful blend of porn and a poem)
That art which inspired him to live alone
And ask for your cents to spin a lyric
Compounded so the price goes up twenty clicks
But hey! He hammers out 8 porms a day
So is he a failure? Well, who’s to say
When you love what you do and you do what you love
And your thoughts are on things that are far above
Human comprehension, or your own for that matter,
For you’re running no race, ain’t climbing no ladder,
While folks give you space as you dance through their lines
Spouting your own in a slurred 6/8 time
As you entreat them to let you partake of their pocket
While hammering trash out on Letter Gothic.
For the Poet for Hire is a freelancing sort
Who gets only as far as the strength in his snort
Since just about everyone considers their life
(especially the one with a life rife with strife)
Reason enough to take up the cowl
As freelancing poets, give weight to their vowels
As they mix them and match them and dandy their dreams,
Insult their insulters, vent all that steam –
Poetry’s not the art it once was, you might see
Ever since ten-dollar words became worth less than free.