Yes, but sometimes
when I pick up my pen,
I remember Homer,
Shakespeare, Dante
Wordsworth, Blake
Tennyson, Keats
Whitman, Dickinson,
Eliot, Yeats
Auden, Cummings,
Thomas, Frost,
Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg–
the reality of impossibility
and limits of inspiration
make me reconsider.
Then whatever start
implodes into atoms
of acceptance
and a wise letting-go
of poetic illusion
or any other pretense.