Two Poems

The Answer

No one gets poetry
anymore,
not even the poor sods
who write it.
Besides, poems don’t need to be read,

they have to be written,
and that’s a
different thing entirely.
Keys need locks.
Locks still work without keys or am I

stating the obvious?
Besides, if
you don’t have the key you
can always
kick down the door and see what you find.

 

The Other Side of the Poem II

I am a door.
I open—words and ideas slip through me—
I close and I have no control over what
happens to them.

A few wind up in poems.
I heard a shitload of them moved away and
tried to make a go of it as a novel.
I think about them sometimes.

I wish that I
were a window, a great dirty sheet of glass,
so people could look out at the world through me
and not see me.

But I am not a window.

I am a door.