Poetry Is a Sickness

You write not what you want, but what flaws flower from rust You want to write about the universe, how the stars are really tiny palpitating ancestor hearts watching over us and instead what you get on the page is that car crash on Fourth and Broadway— the wails of the girlfriend or widow, her long lamentation so sensuous in terrible harmony with sirens in the distance Poetry is a sickness You want to write about Adoration, the glistening sweat on your honey's chest in which you've tasted the sun's caress, and instead what you get is a poem about the first of four times your mother and father split up Want to write about the perfection of God and end up with just another story of a uniquely lonely childhood If I had a dime for every happy poem I wrote I'd be dead Want to write about the war, oppression, injustice, and look here, see, what got left behind when all the sand and dust cleared is the puke-green carpet in the Harbor Lights Salvation Army treatment center A skinny Native girl no older than seventeen braids the reddish hair of her little four- or five-year-old Down's Syndrome daughter Outside, no blinking stars No holy kiss's approach Only a vague antiseptic odor and Christian crest on the wall staring back at you I didn't say all this to that dude who sent me his poems from prison You want everyone to feel empowered Want them to believe there is beauty locked in amber inside each of us, and you chip away at that shit one word at a time You stampede with verbs, nouns, and scalpel adjectives Middle-finger your literalist boss Blow grocery cash on library fines Sprain your left knee loading pallets all day for Labor Ready You live in an attic for nine years You go bankrupt You smoke too much Drink too much Alienate family and friends Say yes, poetry is a sickness, but fuck it Do it long enough, and I promise like an anti-superhero your secret power will become loss Loss like only old people must know when the last red maple on the block goes and the drizzle turns to snow Maybe the best poem is always the one you shouldn't have written The ghazal that bled your index finger Or caused your sister to reject your calls for a year The sonnet that made the woman you loved fear That slam poem you're still paying for The triolet that smiled to violate you through both ears But Poet, Sucker, Fool It's your job to find meaning in all this because you are delusional enough to believe that, yes, poetry is a sickness, but somehow if you can just scrape together enough beauty and truth to recall, yes, that Broadway car crash was fucked up, but the way the rain fell to wash away the blood not ten minutes after the ambulance left was gorgeous Or how maybe your mother and father would sometimes scream, but also wrapped never-before-seen tropical fruit for one another every Xmas Eve How in the morning before opting out I watched that tiny Native girl fumbling to braid her own and her now- snoring mother's long black hair together in a single cornrow— If I can just always squiggle down like this: even half as much as what I'd otherwise need to forget maybe these scales really will one day tip to find each flaw that made us Exquisite