In Answer to a Stupid Question I Asked

Poetry is a war with words.

The enemies, though shift and shade

and sink and pot and pan and anything

else you can aim at, vary.

No matter.  

Your arbitrary wanderings across the page

spoke to nothing less than your

diminished self.  Who cares?

You know the answer:  no one.

Anyone can throw down a comma

like a gauntlet, and challenge the stars

to a duel:  they won’t pretend to notice

because they don’t:  Your paeans to the moon

don’t qualify as beautiful.  Or strange.

Or different.  They don’t qualify.  

Period.

Let me mention:  diatribes about lost love,

or love not found, or love not wanted,

or love not sound at its core, or love gone wrong,

or love recovered, or love expected

do not, repeat, not interest even the object

of your baleful, woebegone ability to go from A

to Z with only a hint of knowledge of the 24

in between.  Contusions heal.  Shut up.

Your heart’s been hurt.  Join a crowd.

Unless you can speak to an unknown door

that has clogged the grasses or the metals

of whatever idiotic metaphor you think

you have devised (I suggest you live more),

put down the pen.  And walk away.  And no

one gets hurt.  

Poetry is a war, using words.

When you wrote that, 

you were a pacifist.

No warrior, you, and 

henceforth, dismissed.

© 2006 – Mark A. Douglas – All rights reserved