You do not miss the Odes and Sonnets

romancing your Spring

as though poems could woo you

like pretty girls with Valentines

 

To pass the fitful millennia of a day

you grind mountains and

inhale decay, blow life.

 

You stretch: an ice age melts.

You shift in your seat; the world opens like breaking bread.

You fart ash on Pompeii, cough plague, sneeze butterflies

and care not in the least if we sneer at

your pretentious sunsets, your passé daffodils,

roll our eyes at corny nightingale cries.

 

You are no subject for this time. We’ve post-post-modernised.

Impassive we slice poems with broken shards from the mirror of life

and serve up cold the detritus of yesterdays events:

sagging beds

cigarettes

styrofoam cups

chewing gum

commercials bleating our inadequacies late at night.

 

You are not serious enough.

A rose may sugar the rhymes of greeting cards 

but for a poem we narrow our eyes

and squint with metaphors at who we think we are

describe the poignant loss of stained sheets

to avert the thought that like cattle we rut,

articulate paradigms of thought

as though we don’t fence our houses like territorial piss,

dab at our nests, eat, sleep, shit.

 

We write poems for Language itself-

our manifold howl against death

and die

swallowed into your earth

which you will digest, excrete

and make bloom.