Dear Billy Collins

I can take a poem, shake it like a wet shirt,
hang it on a hook, catch the drips in a bowl
on the floor, can wring it out, get what it holds.

Reading's not the problem. What I need
is a how-to poem, one that can help me
get at the rawness in my gut, let what I find
bleed out without creating a mess.

Where do you get off, anyway, writing
a line that sails like a catamaran
carving itself effortlessly toward the edge
of truth? I watch it glide, follow it from the dock
where my foot is lodged in a hole in the planks.
I can even feel the breeze slapping the sails.

But when I write, words clunk
like bricks schlepped in a wheelbarrow
with a flat tire over a scraggy field of stone.

It must go back to my youth, when I wasted
all that time thumbing photographs in magazines.
I suppose when you were that age
you were off somewhere smoking
dictionaries: inhaling the potency of words,
savoring their taste as they wafted over
your tongue all gray and vaporous, cataloging
their weight, density, multifarous hues.

— Lafayette Wattles