0158 For Fjr; Here's To Poetry

This is the illicit still of poetry half hidden in the dry ditch beyond the hedge firewater drunk from an old tin mug it takes the skin off your throat and drops it into your glowing stomach and you don’t ask but maybe wild crab-apples, turnips, a handful of stolen barley, an old boot, perhaps an incautious rat who drowned in the middle of drinking a wild dream such as rat never had before this the raw stuff untaxed by rules out here in the unfenced fields not much spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammar, metre, euphony; if Emily had been a prizefighter she’d have breathed like this but drunk, frozen breath steaming in the night air seated on an old apple box the stars never were so bright the heart so near