Sacrificial Poets

It’s Friday, August 11^th.

Poetry fishing.

I’ve come up dry and wanting.

The desire to net an elusive sonnet
fails to compensate for the wrong lure.

Three of us on a tri-hull
trolling Lake Michigan.

The cooler is stocked
with angst, metaphor, and several cases
of Heileman’s Special Export.

If I have to tell you that it’s a beer,
you’ve never struggled for your art
as a poet.

Sunburnt and giddy,
posing on the pier with our catch —
Cooper, skunked the day long,
slinks to a surreptitious book store.

It’s a hell of a thing when a poet
pawns off store-bought filets
to his family.