When we write a good poem
It is we who write the poem
It is we—it is really we—even if it seems me,
Solitary, glimpsed, standing beneath a tree,
Smoking in the cold rain,
Is the one writing the poetry.
I write because I don’t like pain—
None of us do, and there’s that “we” again—
And poetry finds a way
To make a poem from pain for you today.
The secret is, a little poison is good,
And this is what the poets have always understood.
The best thing for me
Is the cigarette of toxicity
Because a little poison is good.
This is the secret poets have always understood.
When the leaves fall, and the air turns chill,
We contemplate what it means to be ill,
But when mother gives us sugar and carbohydrates
We love with our tongue what our inside hates;
We do not know what’s happening inside
Or where the slender lovers hide,
But when poison flies into me
I understand what’s going on immediately.
Everything I feel from the cold rain
Pushes the poetry out, as a cure for pain.
It was sugar—not cigarettes—which made me insane.
I thought we loved sugar, but we
Grew into wisdom; we cannot be
Poets, if we lie about the house and eat;
We go, instead, to dreary places where meat-eating smokers meet
And we talk of all the ways we
Write poems. This is exceedingly interesting to me.