Poetry Doesn’t Need You

Poetry doesn’t need you to dress all in black, to shave your head bald, or to polish your boots

Poetry doesn’t need you to track all the times you’ve had dinner with Ginsberg or channeled Rimbaud

Poetry doesn’t need you to lift it up out of some half-perceived stupor or to rage at the youth whose attention you’ve lost

Poetry doesn’t need you to jump out a window or to burn your lungs smoking or to carve up your skin

Poetry doesn’t need you to coax out its meanings or to tease out its strategies or to unpack its bags

Poetry’s doesn’t need you to pinch yourself, wind yourself, catch yourself spinning in spontaneous whorls

Poetry doesn’t need you to put forth sarcastic, bombastic, gymnastic, fantastic ecphrasis

Poetry doesn’t need you to emulate or imitate its grandest achievements or its infamous botches

Poetry doesn’t need you to wind it up, set it down, launch it or light it or warm up its hands

Poetry doesn’t need you to flirt with its dactyls or stroke its sestinas or unzip its pantoums

Poetry doesn’t need you to vibrate or widen your mindscope or suckle your cow sack or snuff up your horn-blow or sweat out your insides or dredge up your backwash or kick in your face cloth or chisel your eye-teeth or sink into quicksand

What poetry needs is a drink and a nap, and for all of its dinner guests—sipping on wine and straining their mandibles—to finally choke on the bones in their throats.

And what poetry wants more than any one thing is a volume of poems that nobody wrote.

“Poetry Doesn’t Need You” appeared in 32 Poems Magazine, Fall 2008.