The Carpenter poet

All the number games
Make a man of letters feel far away,
A better builder of house roofs than temples for the mind to dwell,
Hip valley crippled, sloping with the common
Yet never touching the ridge
Never reaching the plate.
Functioning in a junction
Less than common
But more than a jack.
Knowing what is behind the wall,
Irrelevance.
Calculating the hard stone and subtracting displacement,
Placing the cold chisel to craft a passage way,
Leading ever farther astray
From literary competence,
Speaking in grunts and moans
Diligently delving into a dimension,
Where my opinion doesn't matter.

Writing

Every word forced
Trying to cohearse
Fire from stones.
Where is the spark?
The friction I've known.
Fact is easier than fiction,
The affliction
Of having nothing to report.
Out of practice
Spinning misery rhythmically,
Looking for a memory
To feed creativity
But every word falls bland
Too bordered in methodology.
Words as dead
As their Latin roots
As deep as the ink on computer screens,
As shallow as the garbage devoured daily.
Pressed hard against the realization
That reality is fed to me
With laugh tracks to my lethargy,
Burning through neurons
With hard facts.

The writer

Lauded by the critics
Award after award
Living of the winnings
All the fame literation affords.
Paid to speak at schools
And paid to read to crowds
His verses well rehearsed
Sentiments echoed across the crowd.
His editor and publicist,
Each taking their own cut,
Relying on his every word
To feed them in the rut.
Iron jawed best seller
With a golden tongue to boot
He could turn the crowd from tears to laughter and push a soul from birth to the great thereafter,
They would fill the room
To the rafters.
Snubbed jealously by other word crafters,
By the close minded and the dafter.
Till one day he met a little beatnik
A little slam that shook him
Took him out of his head
And he saw his own style a constraint.
He had sold his soul
To be great,
Catered to the creatures
Whose only critisism was,
Not enough punch lines and cliffhangers.