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 you do not, if you 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, 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 and 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   Oh it breaks my heart   I don't know how they do it   So don't ask me      And as for my inflammatory writ   Well, I wrote it an' 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 and awful   Ululate the last Great American Novels   An unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit   But at least they didn't run, to their undying credit