who reads people’s faces
we hadn’t met for years,
one day, upon seeing me again,
he said, “Why? You’re a poet now?”
there was regret in his tone,
so obvious I felt it stung me
(I wonder which part of my face
had changed “poetically” for him
to say that)
it was two years ago
when I only had a thin chapbook
of eleven pieces of rubbish
I was, socially, ashamed of
while watching my students
struggling with their exams,
I wrote a poem about sea of
rickety tables and chairs
cumulated in desperation with
little fish (the students)
jumping crazily;
my colleague, who teaches
poetry, asked me a copy of
the rubbish, looking at me
with admiration
[subtext: ‘don’t you have better
things to do?’]
love poems, rubbish poems,
a poem about a left shoe
a longing
still I can’t stop wondering
where it could go wrong
about being a poet
then, heartbroken poems,
why love seems so difficult
we’re sick of it if it’s too much
go crazy if it’s too little
too tiring but it seems like
we never really learn from
that that creates panic and tears
poems that cut –
an idea too un-American
they go against what my
creative writing professor said
“a good poem should end with
‘a light coming through the blinding.’
what do you call a poem that causes
its readers to jump to the river?”
I don’t know,
Gloomy Sunday?
chatting over the messenger with
a girl-friend of mine at dawn
basically killing each other with
mockery and dirty jokes,
guys around the globe, hair,
chests, and parodied love-making
rituals, joyfully, so it seemed
then at noon a call woke me
the same girl, weeping,
brokenhearted, telling me this
Fatal Attraction-ish thing
she’d just done in the name of
love
things like this
Aristotelian tragedy / comedy
in contemporary face –
a slanted mirror
if a poem can break, can another
mend? I know a couple can
not mine, I don’t know what mine
can or cannot do; I know how some
of yours are
then there’s Ted and Sylvia,
theirs are too fast, too burning,
deadly
on and off the paper
no, let's not be Sylvia and Ted,
or anyone with such
ammunition
is it so ill-fated to be a poet?
and then, in the shower just now
I remembered an idea of a poem:
cigarettes and me –
our 'relationship' – how it feels
smooth, certain, and everlasting
kind of on and off but
everlasting
‘would it be much better if people can
love each other secretly forever?’
mmnn… it would create another
problem with consequences so scary
I quit the idea
still perhaps I can learn a thing
‘no rush, take it slow, let it flow’
…but it’s not exactly the same!
yeah right, to be a poet
what world’s problems can you solve?
if I could quit poetry, I would
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