“Poetry is escape from emotion” –TS Eliot
I’m so glad that whine
Is a truck in the distance
And not a mosquito in my ear.
That truck is my hero.
“You climb that hill. You whine all you want.
Love is the only thing I want near.”
But what is Love, sighed Plato, long ago,
And if you read the Symposium you see,
After they all speak, and finally Socrates,
Oh, man, it’s a hungry mosquito.
The others around the symposium table
Compare love to beauty, a mutual itch,
A destiny of sighs, beauty, beauty, beauty;
No, Socrates says love’s a son of a bitch,
Lonely, ugly, resourceful, full of desire:
“I must climb this hill, I want you,
Let me crawl into your bed.”
It loves you until it’s fed,
And you’re dead for so long you fulfill
Your destiny: A poem. A truck wailing up a hill.
I’m so glad my poem was about something out there.
The worst poems are intimate. The worst poems care.