Poetry (2000)

Poetry.
Was it meant to be
Obscure ramblings of your showcase mind
Or distant thunder mutterings
Of your brain grown old or senile philosophically young?

We use metaphors
Snatching infinite meaning from circumstance
And we are lucky if people who read us know them
Otherwise we remain obscure
Something for scholars and poetry students to decipher.

Who is poetry for?
Cathartic man or woman
Getting out something
May be a whim?

Or are you talking
To people you can’t see
Reading your lines by a light of their own

What you say is not your own
The words have been spoken a thousand times
Before and after. Agreed.

But are you talking?
Do you intend to wind about
With musty bylanes and grey corridors
Chuckling over anecdotes but you know

Or are desperately trying to express
What cannot or should not.
In your discordant harmony of words
Are you berating, trumping,
Planting your foot on and shoving away
Language? Upchucking your
I suppose rigid education?
Getting the real feel?

Why are we writing?
If for others
Can we as poets afford to be so obscure
In our references to private haunts

Or are we just expressing a perfect metaphor
And leave no footnotes to tell the story?

Why are we writing?
What do we mean?