You send your poems out to magazines, submit them for competitions. The seemingly endless wait ends abruptly with the self-addressed envelope, the returned poems and the cursory rejection. OK, the odd one strikes a kind of fool’s gold: a diploma, a second place,  publication in a small magazine which passes into total obscurity within weeks.

Maybe this is the price one has to pay for a prolonged spell of fearless inspiration:  Muse-led inspiration.  There’s a file full of these earlier pieces some of which work fairly well, some not at all.  I just kept putting the things down, often late at night, re-working the material the following day.   More often than not that sense of freedom nowadays seems a thousand miles away.   

Why and how does the Muse decide to come for a stay? Is it a case of her looking for a suitable vacuum, fallow ground, a nice, juicy victim or is it your run-of-the-mill inexplicable mystery?  

Anyway The Last Poem captures a classic Muse-moment. There she is, in the poem, doing exactly what she is supposed to do.  The  image arrives right on cue, just as it appears in the poem. I think it works quite well, I don’t know how or why.  And to top it all, I can’t for one  moment claim I was responsible. The credit is hers. You can’t win can you?

 

He sat and reached purposefully for his pen
the long-discarded note-book on his knee.

This was going to be the last poem,
the final poem. It would be written
in a considered draft that very evening.

Over the ensuing weeks
it would be pored over,
amended and edited
until it was sharp as a lemon.

Then he would type it slowly, painfully,
to avoid the usual typos,
and then he would have done with it.

The completed poem would be unread,
unseen by even his closest friends.
he would consign it to his bottom drawer.

Having decided on his course of action
he paused waiting for his Muse
to drop the appropriate image. 

A skull appeared, a neat hole
incised in the crown. Through the hole
thrust a vibrant sprig of parsley.
The lower jaw chattered incomprehensively.
There was a clacking of loose teeth.
It was several moments before
he could make it out.

          “There is no last poem!
           There is no final poem!” it said.