Petite Mort (or birthing a poem)

a terrible beauty is born
always and only in the mind of the reader.
the poem in the mind in the act of finding,
memory and desire, stirring
bulling through wave wrack, of the Creator
and waits for the world to begin

shape without form, shade without color
with no ideas but in things
life and death, rage and madness
kill it at once or let it go
for this madness is the divinest sense

the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness
so rage, rage against the dying of the light
because dying is an art, like everything else
the body dies; the bodies' beauty lives
and death is that remedy all singers dream of;
the poem exists

I have no mockings or arguments, I witness
and wait.

A Cento form abbreviated (use of 100 lines by other poets to create a new poem)
Line acknowledgements
1) W.B. Yeats
2) & 17) Elaine Equi
3), 10) & 15) Wallace Stevens
4) & 7) T.S. Eliot
5), 6) & 10) W.S. Merwin
8) W.C. Williams
9) P.V. Dugan
11) Emily Dickerson
12) & 16) Allen Ginsberg
13) Dylan Thomas
14) Sylvia Plath
18) & 19) Walt Whitman