A Prostitution of Poetry

:::::

Often a poem is written for nobody
it lives off itself
devouring the crusts of its walls
like a fellow drinking soup through a
plaster of paris
where someone has stamped a hiaku on a naughty anecdote,
an object of his acrimony
he dangles quivering upon the board
wedged between the weight of that sentence.

There are poems camouflaged in schools,
like "yours and mine and hers and his and theirs"
to a conglomerate of flourescent dolls,
greased knaves, dolled up in alabaster
until someone probes,
and word-magicians rise on that cue
imprinting upon our tabula rasa
figments of poems
congested with over-thinking.

Poems like these spring from conversations
between the imagined word and the pause
at the end of the sentence. The poet,
the recruiting officer- the ghosts of each other.
Phantasms walking, bending, laughing, writing,
gaping, singing, frolicking, caressing, eating,
crying, learning- sometimes the other way round-
frisking ourselves for allusive alphabetical alliterations.
Abusive!

Conscious lovers you see, do debunk phrases.
so it lingers on that faculty of soul,
detached from flattery of ownership
upon a procession of intellectual and sensual assaults
determined by aggression, some by love.