Don't Call Me A Poet

Being EnlightenedBeing Enlightened Posts: 5,746
edited December 2003 in Poetry, Prose, Music & Art
Like the streets of a city it winds through me,
boisterous like children at a playground,
it burns many colours at the end of the street,
it's a piece of newsprint blown in the wind,
the core of an apple fallen in the gutter,
an angel someone has left on the window ledge.

Poetry! For years I wanted to be a poet:
a face like Shelley's, a Byronic club-foot walk would do,
Brechtian glasses that looked inward and outward,
wine-breath of Baudelaire, vatic exclamations of Gregory Corso,
the fantastic trance-like utterances of Robert Desnos.

And then I met people who were poets.
Their nervous hearts were burdened with poetry,
their tongues leaden from gonging too much poetry,
the rectitude-not to be confused with their rectums-stank of rotten poetry fish.
Jesus, they even compared their published work to children!
No doubt about it, they held pens that resembled poets' pens,
upgraded to computers that resembled poets computers,
even raided their dreams and dressed them up as poetry.

Now I no longer want to be a poet
(one must disguise it at all costs).
Poetry is something to spear with an umbrella,
something to turn in your hand and pity its fossilized existence, then chuck it in the rubbish,
something to put in a taxi for a long ride and when the taxi driver becomes suspicious it can't pay he'll thump the daylights out of it,
something to spit apple seeds at,
something to walk across a zebra crossing an Warwick Road, for the trucks will never stop for it,
something to wrap in tinfoil and roll down the staris,
something to push through the window with a rope around its neck,
something to shut in a dirty sock drawer,
something to...
BEWARE OF POETRY! IT IS WRITTEN BY POETS!
Call me a street, a child, a piece of rubbish, an apple core, even an angel, but don't call me a poet.




I just loved this poem! It's from a book called "Rotten poetry fish" by Hume Cronyn
Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. - Leonard Cohen
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Comments

  • I love cronyn! he's a genius!
    There have been shows where maybe the whole first half of the show my eyes have been closed. and then you'll look out in the crowd and there'll be somebody totally lost in their head, in exactly the same place you're in. That, to me, is the essence of music

    ~Jeff Ament
  • The snake has woven my shirt.

    Who said that all oceans are made up of water?
    I have seen a man howl like the ocean
    and be as dry as the sand.

    I have seen a road that burned like a rose
    and all men who followed it drown like a stone.

    A leaf may float on the wind
    but the tree is never the same.

    The sky can turn monstrous with clouds
    while a kernel of corn still shines like the sun.

    A word can open you like a flower
    and be sharper than a knife.

    Men who fall down and kiss the earth
    know the long journey to a woman.

    Even if the world were draped in black,
    the sight of an ant is a miracle.

    Who can forget a tree late at night
    when the leaves swim like a shoal of fish.

    Whoever finds a starfish
    is married to the rope of heaven.

    There is no ending.
    Tomorrow arrives with a dose of oblivion

    or another handful of truths.





    Another poem--same book--such a good book!
    Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in. - Leonard Cohen
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