Hemingway

 

I’m trying Ernest Hemingway, I am

To be like you

To be a man

To speak words like the whip tough crack

Of leather on a madman’s back

To be as simple as I am profound

To grow the kind of beard

In which a lesser man would drown

But

The words that dance out of my brain

Are playful. Daft. And, I’m afraid

They’d run a mile if they met up

With the rough and twisted gnarly phrases

You carved into the wood

I suppose your thoughts might start the same

I suppose it’s in the drafting

That they shake the whims and notions away

The road you make them walk

Hones the muscle

Makes them strong

And I quite like the road

I’ll walk for miles, I’ll do the time

But it’s the journey and

The stuff we see along the way

That, for me, brings out the song

I know. I’m sorry, Ernest Hemingway

I’m not tough

I haven’t got what you might call “the stuff”

My words don’t have that discipline

And I love some of them too much

But don’t give up on me,

You old man. If you could see

The crossed out lines

And scratched through phrases

That scar this poem’s first draft pages

You’d smile, maybe, 

A little

Through your tangle of a bearded face

And find me on that long, tough road

And meet me

In the broken places