Poetry...Poem?

Today a poem should strip away the clothes of the contrived working man. It should devolve the clean shaven, kempt, politically correct, briefcase tossing man into a beared neandertal. Rip the souls out from the polished black leather shows and have him feel every jagged stone he steps on and how much it hurts when it pieces the flesh. All in all, it should make him feel again.

A poem should talk about life and pain, death and joy, indifference and ignorance. A poem should derive its passion from the subdued emotions most of us take for granted. A poem should rekindle old love, and new lusts. the uncensored David, the cloistered Mary, the wind that whips like a slavemaster around the waist and leaves a deep scar.

A poem can make a stoic man cry. To break down the Iron Curtain and add white and blue to the sea of red. It can liberate a people who for so long wanted to write their own name or just know what it is, then revise it into a silhouette of past tribulations. A poem inspires the illiterate to read and the literate to teach. It crushes the burden of Ionic pillars and elevates the yeoman to heroic reputations.

Once it has been interpreted, a poem should be buried and die. Giving a void for new poems to inspire the new yeoman. The gravestone should be as ambiguous as its context and the poem will lie and wait for transubstatiation into another body. Like a lone spider in the corner of the shower, waiting to be acknowledged before its inevitable drowning. To circumvent the drain with the water as it sings a drunken sailors song, before entering into the black fluid abyss.

A poem is the only antidote to supremacy, the lone potion to wash aside Marx and Locke and touch the heart like an aesthetic hand. The perfect concoction of cologne and perfume, transexual and open-minded, from San Fransico to Austin. To shoot down a crow to fix its broken wing. To clear the fog or the blinders from the race horse, and settle down in the middle of the track and stare at the audience who scream is their dispare.

A poem is water. To extinguish the burning flame of fascism, revitalize the parched lips of an old mother wasting away in a hospital bed. A cool refreshing glass when one is hot under the cap. A place where animals of all sorts set their animal instincts aside bathe in the swimming whole. without it, to die of thirst and have intestons break like dust.

When drums were barrels, religion was bread, fishing was made by hand, and music was lightning, every woman was Cleopatra.

Poetry wasn't poetry.

Poetry is the dispair in our lives, the weight of lead pressed against the back of our necks. The feeling of thousands of papers on our chest and the relief when they are down to the last one. Poetry is our fathers, the Gunpowder Plot, and for those who are not, forgot, or even if they are, the everlasting lust of better. or for worse. But the striving to burden ourselves with others so that we may feel what other are feeling. have felt. Poetry stops the heart, and pumps the chest until blood flows like a small stream towards a river.