April 14 – Not the next poem

Hello All. Today the prompt was to write a parody or satire of a well known poem. I have chosen The Next Poem by Billy Collins, which I will include, in all its glory, below. But first, with all apologies to Mr. Collins, my entry –

Not The Next Poem

Had the question ever come up,
NaPoWriMo poets would all say the same thing:
the only poem we are interested in is this poem,
the one being written, the poem of today.

It is the only answer,
which conjures up some kind of hope
and manages to place on the lighter tray
of the scale of desperation a gram of promise.

The problem is
as soon as you start to write it,
this poem is not yet a finished poem,
rather a poem your are trying to write,
a poem that needs time and attention,
a clinging fungi needing to be fed now,
no time to wait for the future richness of decay.

And that is why I have an obsession with 
this poem, in where it is going,
or how it will manage to find a way to the end.

It could waft into daydream,
maybe shift into the rehab waiting room
where I really am entering this into a notebook,
or circle back to the layers of fungi, for all I care.

All I care about is this poem,
not the next one, or number 15, or 20,
which might even have a harder prompt-

A haiku - what hangs on your miniature tree?
A clerihew - how does a shrouded piano sound?
The ultimate pose poem of a caged bird?
Or, how about this?
How to finish a poem with a striped umbrella?

And here is the original poem by the wonderful Billy Collins, originally published in POETRY May 2004, and copied from poetryfoundation.org