You say there should be no I in poetry, no
Heart, no love, no mention of one’s great
Grandmother’s apron hanging
On the door. No, maudlin, no forked-
Tongues, no sentiment, no overwrought
Lines, empty rooms or signs of forced
Entries, breaks, no earnest, no sincere, no
Half, no heart, no self-indulgent diatribes,
No descriptions of former, fellating teenage
Selves; no glacial family dramas, no matter how
Original or spare, no making linen, no organic
When there are structures, constraints,
Poems wide, and wild, as Africa propagating
Daily your inbox, words, words, like so much lint
And silt, words, tough husks, upon the page.
No more the half-drunk glasses tipped
This way and that, the poet sitting thoughtless
On a bough, whimsically, confessing this
And that, a capricious grin, a gin, the light
Upon a seed of, no, no, not that…
No more poet standing ear to fox’s paw,
Or tongue in grandfather’s rusted—no
Familial, no roots, no digging or rhyming
Tools, no trivets, trinkets, familiar, no
Romantic fields of feelings, no seamless,
Scentless, sensual, no arabesques of desire.
In our times, you say the poet is a conveyor
At the belt of generated text, head bent,
Labouring information overload into shapely
Avant gard. And applaud we do your bent-
Boxed work, the clarity of your mind, decisions
Grappled, hooked, as well-trained Mountaineers
Scale the sheer face of text. But poetry
Is not a concrete structure, and if not
Wrought with tears and fears, how will these lines
Expose my shameless loving of all things rooted
In the earth, vein and blood, Mother, Father, shit
And death, sorrow and desire, words, common,
Soft as river rock, and oh, I’ll tell you just
How lonely we all are, abandoned in a pretext
Of connected thoughts, and reaching out
Right now, across the black gulf of what not
To say, or be, and touching the face of
Why not be poet, and let poet be.
