All These Poets

 

All these poets with their wrinkled hands full of 

freshly poured over poems are driving me into the 

dried wheat fields like a black block of crows. 

Offering a collectable cigarette, they light the damned thing

with another hand-rolled poem, they set purposely on fire.

 

They'll give you a little happy dance, but when 

they finally take off their clothes poems are stuck 

to their bare feet like blades of wet grass. 

And their lips taste like day-old poems, dipped into 

cold barbecue sauce. They walk well-marked trails with you

 

after little yellow summer butterflies or bouncing on poor

fireflies for cheating the odds, but when it comes

to a glorious time to free all the prisoners 

back to nature, their skeleton keys will only unlock 

a wooden chest full of more shitty poems, stinking 

of seaweed and pasty seashell lava. What's wrong, they 

will say, don't you even like poetry? Eyelashes winking

and blinking like traffic lights hit by lightning, but 

the closer you look the more you make out 

the ends are fashionably fastened with small painted pink 

and green metal poems. Earrings are acrobats with poems

to be handed out like flyers to the breathless 

thrilled to death crowds clamoring below the bleachers for 

careless courageous letter loopers. They'll invite you over for 

dinner, but your forks and knives will have been 

replaced by rolled up poems for napkins, tied with 

a flurry of typed out blurbs. These poets don't 

believe in poetry as a way of life, or 

being awake in the world, they see it as 

a very fine job and they must get there

first or die trying, before anyone else. All these 

poets want you to swallow their words without chewing.

Without thinking. Without buttoning or unbuttoning your pants. Without 

further feeling at all for the poor souls who 

might need it the most. Without so much as 

thank you for the sacrificial listens shoved way down 

in your uncomfortable seat. All these poets, waiting to 

deliver exactly what's expected of them by their constituents.

How about speak from the heart, your heart, drop

all the bullshit and don't try to please anyone.

2015

Bonus poem:

 

The Ragged Stars Spit Their Stained Wooden Teeth on the Soggy Ground

by Darryl Price