The Bean Counters
By Agony Cramp
“Has anybody acted?” said the poet
Beating out a plot in verse;
But the academics chewed upon their nosebags
and some let fall a curse.
And a novelist ran out of the cloister,
behind the poet’s back.
And he beat upon the door again a second time;
Is anybody in this shack?
But none condescended to the poet,
no eye to the lock was pressed
to peer through the chink at his red nose
nor offer a rag to blow it.
But only the metronomes answered
from deep in the catacombs
from out of their wood and metal boxes
in voices grey and rancid;
cloned rhythms in syllabics without meaning
were heard in the theatre’s boom,
echoing like a vast cathedral
to the poet's sense of doom.
And his feet were worn out with thumping,
his bunions torturing his soul.
While his play, failed, plotless and unending,
fell down a deep black hole;
So he bitterly beat on the door, shouting
“Bastards” and lifted his fists:--
“Tell them I know, where their books are
and I know how this plot twists.”
Never an acknowledgement they gave him.
Though they heard every word.
Their ivory towers impregnable and inward
held tenure long preferred.
Ay, they heard his feet upon the meter
and the beat of crutches on stone,
And how the pages fell upon the pavement
when the poet left, alone.
[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited August 21, 2005).]
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