The Common Poet

I have conversed with the common man in warm and well-worn pubs. I have been a ribald, and a leery lout, a seducer of barmaids. I have been common, the way a city pidgin is common, its scabbed claws a common sight, slipping in and out of poorly lit doors. Poets are born poor, poorly treated, and poorly thought of. The wealthy used to be poets, but their intelligence was pawned and loaned to them by the winking, wicked streets. They made daffodils out of dog, many swooned, but the common people, we spat out their perfumed souls for they were distasteful, much more so than the knowing fools I talk to in the most common of pubs.