Last year

Two thousand poems died of loneliness,
cold and wet at the bus stop,
unable to find a rhyme for themselves,
tripped on poetical outcrop.

Five hundred and seventy were hit and run over
by drunkenly-driving coffee cups,
three hundred-odd asphyxiated
on inexcusable grammatical hiccups.

Two hundred and ten little poems
were the runts of rhyming triplets.
They died and left their siblings-
two hundred and ten little couplets.

Seventy-five died of opium,
twenty-one of spurious ink,
eight died of handmade paper,
one of an overdose of pink.