This passion for poetry’s poisoning me
I wish that my muse she would just let me be
My nights and my days I once spent in a dream
Now pen I hold poised while my senses all scheme
Those rose-tinted raptures and fanciful flights
I’ve swapped for composing through long lonely nights
Those needs I have nurtured, now spill on the page
(My soul’s secret sorrows, once kept in a cage)
It’s taking control of my thoughts and my time
It rules with a rod resonating with rhyme
This plague, they call poetry, festers in me
Old wounds it’s infected; for so long pain-free
Love’s lost lamentations I’d buried like bones
In sad, shrouded sepulchres solid as stones
Now breathe with the breath of the bitterest bile
In venomous verse that is vicious and vile
This passion for poetry, after my death
Will want to outlive me on my borrowed breath
I beg you to burn, therefore, when I am gone
This poor poet’s pages I’ve written upon.