I’ve got forty lines for a poem,
Maybe three hundred words if I’m clever,
But I have no clue what to write about.

There are so many words in the English language
That nobody’s ever going to know them all,
And not a single one helps me start this stupid poem.

Let’s see;
I could go all Robert Frost-ian and write romantically
About wandering around in the forest, pedantically
Choosing lines based on their last word
And walking down a different trail than normal.

I could pull an Emily Dickinson —
Write longingly about my good pal death —
Waxing poetic about the setting sun —
And not really seem to end up saying much of anything.

Maybe try to be Seamus Heaney,
Comment on digging in the sundered bog,
Reflecting on a childhood filled
with nature’s wonders, and catching frogs.

Or maybe a haiku would work!

Spring is here at last,
New leaves, plus pollen falling;
Just like my math grade.

No, everything seems to fall short of the mark.
There’s a saying that “there’s nothing new under the sun”
And, yeah, I’m feeling that right about now!
Every good idea I have, well,
Turns out I’m stealing it from somebody else.

Maybe I should go with a theme or something instead.
People have said to write about a personal experience,
But I’ve done nothing interesting that I want to write about.
Or about an emotion, but I have too many of those, and don’t really want
To open that can of worms right now!

I guess what I’m trying to say is poetry looks pretty simple,
Putting words in lines on a page,
You get to make up the rules.
But finding something to write about is pretty hard.
And once you do, you only have forty lines to say something incredible.
And now I’ve used up thirty-nine.
Damn.