Got me a muse,
Chained inside of my head.
I make her sing,

When I lie down to bed.
Oh, She'll weep from her pillar,
In her sweet clipped refrains,

She'll sow sylvan seeds,
In the dark loam of my brain,
That will quicken and sprout,
In my startled,
Heuristic dreams.

At the bell,
In the morning,
I stumble from bed.
after my first cup of coffee,
I light my third cigarette,

I sit down with my confessor,
My writing machine. I try to get,
Her damn song out of my head,
And on to clean white paper.

But it's no use,
It's war, of the tabula rosa,
On that sterile white plain,
The song of the muse razed,
By the language of the machine.

With an iron thumb
Of diction, punctuation, and syntax,
I plant hedge rows of bob-wire
around gardens of broken glass.

--- Rough,
First draft, constructive criticism,
"Just cut that out or maybe,
Graft something in,"
To round off the song or
Complete a sentence
At last  . . .

It is done, not of course,
Any dead part of the muse
But indeed something more then
Paper and ink, pheromones and blood
That hint of the passage
Of an unwilling guest
In my disquiet woods.