Waste Worth the Waste

How can one wait for times to come?
Think of all those seize-the-day types

Who’ve been dust the length of more lives
Than they could count back to the dawn

Of the world they knew they should seize.
On the one hand, they were quite right—

They lived on the thin lip of death.
Still, if all you’ll get is just now

And a bit past that, give or take,
Should you not be all the more rapt

With each blink, not to miss a bit?
Why waste this, if it’s all there is?

We have a test to use on poems—
If you can sum their view of the world

In prose, with just a few of us,
And the gloss still holds your thoughts rapt,

Then there’s a good claim to be made
For that piece as a piece of us

To keep. A poem glossed “seize the day,”
Not so much. We’d like to see you

Make us say, in just a few lines,
What’s the worth of what must be waste

To the beast who must lose it all,
The day, the speech, the thoughts, the life.

Squeeze us in rhymes or chants, make us
Bleed, draw rich scenes in your black ink,

But say a thing with us you don’t,
No one yet knows, what your waste’s worth.