With nods and grins and pats on the back.
They tell you it's a machine
A living organism
A game
I'll teach you
To save the poem from the teachers
A poem is not a game
A poem is the kind of work
That doesn't feel like working
A poem is not machine
I am not an operator
I am any other hand
On the oil lease, just west of Odessa
I go to work and feel
The bolt creak beneath my wrench
The iron groans
I lever this rig into
Dreadful deconstructive disassembly.
A poem is not a tree
I am not a tourist in a sticky arboretum
I am any other hand
On the logging crew, just east of Vancouver
I feel the ring
Echo up through the bones in my forearms
The song of the hammer, meeting the stake
I hear the pulp crack
The verse splits its trunk.
The poem is, or ought to be
The voice of any other hand
The poem ought never be
That which keeps the worker from reading
That which obscures ain't poetry.
The poem is the call of our fathers
Who toiled in the inky mines
Who tilled the fields past sundown
With batty cries and echoes
Keeping track of who was where.
It is the song our mothers sang
Who washed our socks,
The sound of their tiptoes, candle lit
In the early mornings of our history
Preparing the way for sunrise.
Our mothers and our fathers
Didn't speak in esoterica
We never required translators
We passed the bounties
Of the hunt and of the harvest
Both ways around the table.
Poetry is not a prison house of language
Not a bedlam of meaning
A poet is not a saffron swathed swami
Poetry is the collective property
Of the people who produce
And those who produce are poets
Even, or especially if
Their produce isn't poetry.
You, reader
Can you hear me?
I'm speaking to you
Shouting through the page
Calling up through the lines.
In the name of the people
I commission you poet
And order you out
To liberate poetry
Get up off your knees
Take up your pen and fight
It's as easy as you make it.
We need no tricks
No fanciful fonts
No artsy enjambment
We poets
Of the popular front
For the liberation of the poetic
We need but to shout
Our love in the dark.
