Wordsmith’s Lament

Writer without a story to tell,
Stuck down here in Writer’s Hell,
telling tales ‘bout men with one dimension
and lives filled up with made-up tension,
trying to jump off the pages
and falling flat on their faces.

Now I know what my teachers meant
when they launched my bleak experiment,
scientific method would be damned
and hypotheses could then expand,
but arithmetic means to geometric scenes
left my heroes stuck somewhere in between,
characters whose interaction
serve as addition by subtraction.

Write, write, write at a frenetic pace,
dropping adverbs all over the place,
describe, depict, be sure to stay active,
keep your boys all smart and girls attractive;
inject your prose with superstitions,
don’t end your thoughts with prepositions.

Be professional, goddammit all,
With every single word you scrawl,
turn lemons into lemonade,
devil’s in the details (or so they say),
make every emotion heaven-sent
and load your stories with denouement.

I started out with intentions best,
who better than me to pass the test?
I’d soon have a big fat 3-book deal,
Escalade with chauffeur at the wheel,
Why didn’t I foresee this mess,
After all, ain’t I a genius?

Somehow it all went down the shitter,
but I plod on, I ain’t no quitter,
it’s a story I now know too well,
stuck down here in Hack Writer’s Hell
writin’ poems with lousy cadence
aren’t a pleasure—they’re a sentence.

Yea, I know the last line doesn’t rhyme—sue me.