It's a bit like the 'nervous nineties' in cricket when a batsman knows he's nearly got a hundred but doesn't want to make a mistake. It's a bit like getting 'the yips' at darts when you can't quite let go. And it's a bit like thinking you are really pleased with your nearly finished new booklet of poems and, although you know that precious few other people are likely to care, you do.On the one hand, you want to get to the printer's shop tomorrow and see how soon they can have it ready but, on the other hand, you dread that feeling of having nothing, not one poem, in the file of worthwhile Uncollected Poems.
Smoke and Mirrors seemed like a fine title. It might take me a day or two to decide if I think I made best use of it in this hasty poem.
Smoke and Mirrors
I could never do legerdemain.
At card tricks and suchlike, I was a duffer.
I couldn’t even fool a simpleton.
I was Tommy Cooper, opera
buffa.
My tricks, such as they were, were slapstick tricks,
Reductio ad absurdam,
where the joke
was on the joke itself. But now I mix
words with other words like trails of smoke.
Poems (although not mine) can thrill a crowd,
like one mirror put opposite another,
that multiply the smoke into a cloud
in which the words seem to go on forever.