Joanna Newsom Follow

Oh, where is your inflammatory writ

Your text that would incite a light, "Be lit"

Our music deserving devotion unswerving

Cry "Do I deserve her?" with unflagging fervor

Well, no you do not, if you cannot get over it

But what's it mean when suddenly we're spent, tell me true

Ambition came and reared its head, and went far from you

Even mollusks have weddings, though solemn and leaden

But you dirge for the dead, take no jam on your bread

Just a supper of salt and a waltz through your empty bed

And all at once it came to me

And I wrote and hunched 'till four-thirty

But that vestal light

It burns out with the night

In spite of all the time that we spent on it

One bedraggled ghost of a sonnet

While outside, the wild boars root

Without bending a bough underfoot

Oh it breaks my heart

I don't know how they do it

So don't ask me

And as for my inflammatory writ

Well, I wrote it an I was not inflamed one bit

Advice from the master derailed that disaster

He said "Hand that pen over to me, poetaster!"

While across the great plains, keening lovely and awful

Ululate the last Great American Novels

An unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit

But at least they didn't run, to their undying credit