The Poet's Diet

[busker]

Sativa mostly,
Lipton’s tea, tobacco and words.
With every poem I grow thinner
first my belt became too long
now a wedding ring has slipped
off a thinning finger into oblivion.
A poem about our lost boy
thins me until I am almost invisible
so I retreat into surrealism
where failing pianos fill an empty stomach.
I guess the scale is next.
It will guess my weight and tell my fortune:
“Pleasures await you by the sea”
not a good place to be thin.
If I get any thinner
I’ll be able to dissolve paint, ha, ha
Nonsense rhymes are next:
“There was an old man of Sativa
Who grew thin as a snake for dinner
They cut off his head and pulled out the thread
That  attenuating old man of Sativa.’ 
And finally, the thinness beyond thinness,
as defined by Aquinas,
and the diet is done.  

I  wrote out a list of things that should be changed, and then I scratched it out
Even though the “thinner” / paint pun and the nonsense verse reference might appear to be distractions, they contribute to the development of the poem
It’s hard to improve upon “with every poem I become thinner”

Wouldn’t change a thing