Delhi Public School English Poetry Competition
DON’T LET YOUR BABIES GROW UP TO BE POETS
By David Allen
Poets aren’t easy to love ‘cause they’re out of control
spending time rhyming, free versing and cursing
when the lines that they write refuse to take hold.
They wear faded black sweaters and tattered torn blue jeans
and frequent the town’s cheap bar scene
and their ink-stained pages never quite translate
to what it was they had set out to mean.
Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be poets
someone who’ll wield a wild pen
scrawling about the starts and ends
and all of life’s in-betweens.
Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be poets
someone whose pockets have nothing but lint
whose loves are counted as who came and went
who relish dethroning all your kings and queens.
Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be poets
they’ll tell all the stories you’d rather keep buried
about phone calls at midnight, the way you got married
and the beauty marks hidden from public display.
Poets are zany odd outcasts who shun the “in” crowd
they frequent back alley bars and cheap coffee dives,
imbibing and reading their poems out loud.
They carry torn notebooks they fill on lonely cold nights,
pen scrawls and typed walls of stanzas they pray
will gel and some day find meaning that’s right.
NOTE: I wrote this for a lovely poet couple expecting their first baby. It’s based on the country tune “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys.”
Type Dancing 