The Muse who hates you is the best inspiration.
Poems are work, they want to explain
How love is best, love that vacation
From real work—that work unsung, done to attain
Poetic worth, laboring for the demanding Muse.
The Muse who loves you is the one you cannot use.
This is why great poetry comes from the past
When monster Muses refused to let the poets rest.
The pagan Muse fought for every advantage,
The glittering eyes of cruelty
Denoting desperate, beautiful beauty,
Beauty of strenuousness and rage,
Any preoccupation with children, infernal,
The mother Muse mocking men who sought the Muse maternal.
When the Christian era came,
The chaste Muse brought the poets fame.
But in today’s irreligious age, chastity might as well be hate.
I love the Muse who loves me, who doesn’t make me wait.
You permit me to write as you sit right there,
My writing fingers entangled in the tangles of your very hair.
Then my poetry dies in the depth of your kisses and your care.
