Wednesday, Apr. 16, 2003 | 12:10 PM

OK-- so I just wrote the first poem I've written in years and years. I wrote it in five minutes after having spent this whole morning reading poetry. It's just something I dashed off and a first draft at that, but DUDE-- I haven't written a poem so easy in years.

All morning I�ve been reading your words.
John Donne pulls my head back down from the clouds
and Elliot jerks me into the ground
And a tweedy dash of Ezra Pound--
genius can bend the barbed wire fence of an iron locked brain.

Emily Dickenson in search of your feathers
And Wordsworth on your bridge
And Rimbaud you wait for a worthy translation of your sloppy wine sodden francais
Anne Sexton�
You who would dare mess with Wicked Witches and Psychiatric Nurses
And Sylvia, your words bake up all crispy shells and soft insides.
I eat them by the forkful and swallow them down and down and down
into my own personal oven

Billy Collins, poet laureate I saw you speak
And fell in love with your forehead and your Art Blakey references.
You are the bread and the knife and the wine and the cup still�
You can be all the cups in my cupboard
Oh, except the one my coffee grows cold in at the moment.

Felighetti you bike through San Francsico hills in beat up sandals,
Goya on the brain,
Rare books peeking from the overstuffed pack on your back,
ink and coffee stains on your fingers holding tight the handlebars.
I see you writing in long scrawly script.
Or no�you play the Remington like jazz piano,
a hand rolled cigarrette dangling from your mouth,
dripping loose tobacco on to grave white reams of paper.

Dylan Thomas mad roaming through the village,
your center of gravity so close to the ground
you are almost like an arrow spinning on a boardgame.
Wandering from bar to bar not gentle, but green, but golden
soaked in whiskey and the light from street lamps.
Newspapers blow in front of you, leading you home.