‘Leak’: A Poem by Leslie Lippincott Hidley

Leak

Oh, versifyingʼs worthless unless you know the what and why
Of saying something deep and true, or of the moon and sky.

Now, nature doesnʼt interest me—no matter how celestial.
The music of the spheres to me, it doesnʼt sound orchestral.

Iʼm gloomy almost all the time, and so my verses whine;
My planets and my stars they tangle up and misalign.

There is no Muse of Doggerel reported by the Greeks;
Then who has cursed me with this knack for using these techniques?

I write in scans that donʼt exist, with rhyming incoherent,
And lines of thirteen syllables are clumpy and theyʼre errant

I write whatever is around, I donʼt go off and seek
Sublimity or rapture, at my best, Iʼm tongue-in-cheek.

Thatʼs not a good enough excuse to write a poem like this
But itʼs the best Iʼve got, and now I’m off to take… a leak?

Leslie Lippincott Hidley is retired from the safety business and lives in a small town in southern California. She has published poetry in Sparks of Calliope and other writing in the Ojai Quarterly and Ojai Monthly. She has just published her first long poem, “The Burglars’ Ball,” available on Amazon and a YouTube video of the same title. It’s a poem about a family of marauding raccoons and how they’re entertained by a boy and his grandfather.