Casey DesPrez

Big Cheese

A poet’s wish: to be like some valley cheese, local but prized elsewhere.
  -W. H. Auden

O I wish that I could be prized, too,
like old blind Homer and Milton,
the Shropshire Blue and Oxford Blue
of poets if not Blue Stilton.

O please make me a Wendsleydale
and not some poet imposter,
not some young Cheese Wiz doomed to fail
but a rich old Double Gloucester

who rides a Cheshire Blue chariot
with wheels of Applewood Chedders,
aged Parmesan poet laureate,
a Muensterous man of letters.

The French have a way with rennet and rind—
Camemberts, Baudelaires—
but they’re a bit squishy, don’t you find?
Besides, they’re French. Who cares.

A Limerick Cahils, Dubliner from Cork,
like pungent old Butler Yeats—
just stab me with a knife or fork,
so long as my poetry grates.

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Casey DesPrez eats cheese and practices dental care for dogs in Elmhurst, Illinois. Casey’s chapbook Animal Spit is forthcoming from Overlooked Press next year.