Inflammatory Writ - Joanna Newsom

Oh, where is your inflammatory writ?

Your text that would incite a light, «Be lit»?

Our music deserving devotion unswerving —

Cry «Do I deserve her?»

with unflagging fervor

(Well, no we do not, if we cannot get over it)

But what’s it mean

When suddenly we’re spent?

Tell me true!

Ambition came and reared its head, and went

Far from you!

Even mollusks have weddings

Though solemn and leaden

But you dirge for the dead

And take no jam on your bread —

Just a supper of salt and a waltz

Through your empty bed

And all at once it came to me

And I wrote him hunched 'till four-thirty

But that vestal light

It burns out with the night

In spite of all the time that we spend on it:

On one bedraggled ghost of a sonnet!

While outside, the wild boars root

Without bending a bough underfoot —

O it breaks my heart;

I don’t know how they do’t

So don’t ask me!

And as for my inflammatory writ?

Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit

Advice from the master derailed that disaster;

He said «Hand that pen over to me, poetaster!»

While across the great plains

Keening lovely & awful

Ululate the lost Great American Novels —

An unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit

(But at least they didn’t run

To their undying credit.)