The Last Word In Poetry 

You can't choose what kind of poet you are.
Classroom or cult, laureate 
or in the garret just for the hell of it.  
Mardy bard dangerous to know.
Or Cheese Poet, Volgon poet, Barry Kent.
Synaesthetic  Symbolist or Imagist 
streamlining stanzas. 
Postmodern punner 
or Romantic stunner-cum-slummer. 
Winherback 1timer 
or lyricynical loverat rote-rhymer. 
Some syllable sentinal, 
prosodic stresshead, tweak freak w/
iambic pentup rage & a rictus gaptoothed 
w/ nonictuses. 

A Beatnik bongo bard
whose Kerouachilles heel is itchy feet, 
wanderlust metre, growing up to be a protopunk 
poet safetypinning syntax into blank, well, 
pretty vacant verse. Po-slam 
champ, boisterous Banjo Byron
spouting professional confessional
McGouggherel. Or egotistical sublime 
enjambing scars; obscurely immaculate,
immaculately obscure 
poete maudit peaking posthumously.

Blackbox syrinx talking to self
in glossolalia of Xanudu.
Mellifluous hyoid expiating
a black ice conscience.

The potter or the sculptor.
The potterer or the sulker.
An immortal name seldomread,
or 1 anon for alltime & typeface,
yet whose fudged floruit was a crow's nest
for the Eye of Providence, 
who agamottoptically
scoped an atlas of experience, 
a traveller's tessitura compact in 
1 couplet the Common Lexicon dibsed.

Living la vida nulla dies sine linea,
linebyline,  daybyday,
poems we write to parse our times
(the 1s we're the 1st to read everytime). 
Less a 'poet' per se,
I label myself a minor breed 
of logotherapeutic gazehound,
catching the lure of jouissance
only in a lapidary 
freezeframe
of its trilliant gait, 
as I snap at an ingenuous truth,
babe-mouth gospel,
or the canniest imprecison,
Joycean ostrichism,
running the creativewritingcourse 
of a lifetime,
salivating at a
mouthful of prime illusion. 

Even doggerel w/ a dedication
doesn't indicate afflatic altruism
- pah, poets are just cadging favours
w/ scrapsofpaper, w/ jingles &
janglednerves of abstract value
only slightly less iffy 
than fiat currency, 
depending on the exchangerate
between the personal & the universal.

Therefore: reader or patron,
oldfriend or 2nd wife; 
puppydog Boswell, Padowan amanuensis;
mechanical hare muses past, present & future:
whoever's there
when swell of soil breaks upon 
some bone glade enclave of dwale & boles,
a badgersett for my scarpered soul,

the granite surfboard wiped out upright 
will puff out its slab & entreat
of you the epitaph I now entrust:
'RIP, Lysander E. Hardy-Pearce.
He couldn't help the kind of poet he was.'

But if angels should sing me to my rest,
I'll know I was the kind of poet no1 read.