The Nelligan Review

In all these days and years, the only thing
I’ve learned, is that a poem needs an engine.
Not a newscaster with ski-slope hair, but colorful
sweaters from old dead aunts, penumbra of dust motes,
crumpled Kleenex, the frayed edges of gossip. A poem
is about all the things that happen in the meantime,
while you were airing the pillows, driving a carpool.
All you missed staring right at what the future
knows that it won’t tell you. There is a radio dial
we can go and listen to all of us breathing together,
rubbing our chasm of souls in an all-night diner.
A poem needs magic, a bell, a hammer, a noise inside
a noise. Never the same thing twice. Only the pathos
that comes over a crowd, the sound of night
eavesdropping on the day. Listen to the glyphs
the branches make on a moonlit night. It tenders
no apologies for bad haircuts, it will howl
with all your stray dogs, in the alleyways of cigarette butts.
A poem needs an engine, not to be sedated as arts and crafts,
the glue made with water and flour. No, it needs the wheels
to spin in the dirt, where someone is kissing
for the first time. It needs a wine glass stomped on
at a wedding, even if it ends in divorce.