From a Poet Aspirant

To Aspirant Poets

Never cut your poetic milk teeth,
Toying with ideas, to write any piece
Written ere, by past contemporaries,
If your verses, would look similar
To theirs, or even worse, inferior.
Refrain, if you’d make no difference!

An aspiring author and poet,
Must write, such a novel piece,
Neither read nor writ afore.
Or perfect, what a past poet,
Would have dreamt to realise.
A matchless way to figure out
If your poems are any excellent,
Is by contrasting them against
Dead, but accomplished poets.

Contemporary poets, so Unpoetic
Are celebrities created by a critic,
Constantly seeking out for an artistic
Fairy. A carpe diem poet, of the occasion,
A rhymester belching with exaggeration,
Pompously puffed up by pouring praise.
But when these invented fairies
Have departed, they rot in extinction,
Decompose quietly in misty oblivion.

Of all great artists an aspiring poet
Can contest with, as an antecedent,
Are the dead; revered most inimitably.
That way, they are like an athlete
Sure-footed, running a race set
Against the timer. Never merely
Venturing to win the competition,
Simply by defeating every opponent
That trails limply, in the marathon!

If you never run against time,
How would you ever know,
If you’d be aborted, or grow,
To write, an eternal rhyme?
Like master, like gent;
Like—but oh! How different!

©roundsquare.