Adaptation

Pure terror stalks the empty page:
scribbling half-formed metaphors,
that rattle at the sonnet's cage
like captive-bred, rare carnivores;

seduced by what the Muses say
- those Machiavellian slatterns -
sweet talking through dreams' DNA
Id's archetypal patterns -

words, like viruses, mutate
to spread unseen within the mind;
the writer apprehends too late
that given truths are pre-designed.

Evolving through covert polemic,
poetry spreads like an epidemic.

Leo Yankevich, self styled gruppenfuhrer of new formalism and part-time run of the mill fascist, felt moved to post the following comment about this poem on the Sonnet Board in November 2006:

'The poem does not want to exist. And it shows.'

Leo and I, the handful of times we have communicated  rarely can see eye to eye. This time I think I actually agree with him. Trying to write poetry which primarilly is based around ideas rather than things or situations is fraught with difficulty. Looking at this now, I wonder what I was trying to do. It comes over as a fairly empty headed attempt to appear smarter than I actually am. Interesting to try writing a sonnet in tetrameter though.