don't do a thing, before the sublime.

First, don't even attempt to write a poem if you are not free.

If all your children were not born on the same night.

If the triplicates that calls themselves your lover

turns nostalgia into guilt and every mistake you have ever made

into something poor and worthless.

Look first,

before you write one, at the dead mountain gorilla in

Cincinnati, then backwards at the offspring he could

have fathered, and not at some human decision powered by

fate.

In fact, before you write a poem, become the opposite sex,

if just for a moment. Grow a vagina, a huge one. Let the

winds from the forest roar in to lift your skirt above your head.

Stumble neatless and excellent down the cobblestone streets

trimming the privet hedges with the cycle that sliced your

entropy to mercy like the black edges of mothers

kitchen linoleum /

Before you write one, get engaged, dirt poor. Without a gown

or an drunk dancing uncle, or  a ring in site. Just a goat

and some pieces of iron but with the ability to locate honey in the

tallest trees. Or to know the bitter grubs from the sweet ones

like the newborn, wild turkey. Gather roots for the people

of the village that cure them of fever

or sprinkle the small drops of it on the infertile.

Slap someone backhanded, before you write one. Yeah, I said it!

Before the storm comes, let a strangers see the power of hatred

caused by external stimuli. Be angry at God and his spells.

Be happy for those with large cars and big house notes.

Spell check the US Constitution. Learn as little Latin

as possible and betroth it  in the little store front Baptist church.

Call the Pope kind for touching the hair of the sickly,

then stay as far away from his a*s as possible.

Get a small dog. A toy something (fill in the blank). Then after

15 years of nursing him back to health, watch the same vet

put him down.  Morn his passing like a mother. What I mean is, be happy,

then sad, then happy for months, then sad for centuries,

before you write a poem. Find  a stick of apple-wood

and write out the names of all the revolutionaries you

know in the sand that big oil had yet to tarnish. Speak  with

the compelling eloquence of the homeless.

compel the attention of bees and crickets or what few humans are left

worthy of speech. Obey the speed limit when no cops are around.

Run through the sprinklers in the neighbors yard. Try, if possible,

to grow another arm that the neighbor man tore off.

Get lost in Macy's. Feed on the alfalfa of short leg girdles

and drink the lime water of Polo pullover tee's.

That's it! Before you dare write a poem, spread yourself as thin as

fragrance. Drive the sprigs or brads into the propagate of reason.

Learn to sprout;

Learn the stolon's of love.

Reviews

[Beccy]

What strikes me here, is that only a poet could possibly understand the ripping of the heart, the sundering of the soul, that permits such words to be spawned.

I was nine when I wrote my first cohesive, if somewhat stumbled lines. Five years later the poem won first prize in a poetry competition and I was awarded both accolade and a ten pound voucher to spend in Waterstones. To this day I am quite convinced that the judges had no idea what I was trying to say; but the ten pounds was well spent on a copy of 'Cotswold Ballads,' by Frank Mansell.

It was enough for me; and as you so eloquently do, I continue to dare as best I can. :))

Beccy.

[h d e rushin]

I wrote my first on by the purest of accidents...and then I sat there, as if I was in a car crash,read moreI wrote my first on by the purest of accidents...and then I sat there, as if I was in a car crash,
wondering what had happened...Was I bleeding out? Could I still feel my legs..?..Did or did not
a lung get punctured? And when none of that was true, I felt deep for a purpose, some possible reason why I had done such a thing. I love your story Beccy. it means that poetry is the matter of happenstance not circumstance. In another universe you can't make this stuff up.. I love you.....dana

[G. Cedillo]

Per usual, I'm blind sided. Thank you so very much for this.

I'd suggest losing the comma in the title...?

[h d e rushin]

whatever you suggest to me G. i'm doing..........thank you brother....dana

[Ed Hart]

and let your heart be broken, by choice, because somehow you know there's more than warfare in the soul, there's something larger to get lost in, to belong to, and i mean broken completely so that it aches for decades in perfect isolation, without prayer or hope, just a guess that there's poetry out there and it belongs to you, and without it there's nothing at all, and finally forget writing altogether until it opens you up from the inside...then, let the poem write you...amen

[h d e rushin]

I wish I could just sit at your knee Ed with my two middle fingers in my mouth and my blanket
next to my cheek while you burn thru artistic legacy and truth beyond this stage of poet-speak
and metaphor. Then I swear to you, all will be all-right.

[M. Shepherd]

Go get the mail in your underwear when it's hot out. It will inevitably be for former tenants so you'll throw it on the nobody shelf that nobody will look at when they get home.

[h d e rushin]

thanks Marcie.......for you and your impeccableness.........dana.....

[CD Campbell]

Wonderful poem. I have to remind myself that life ultimately is not a competition and let the fire die down a bit. Maybe in the absence of any more words you will know how much I really like this one. CD

[h d e rushin]

thank you CD.....You are my hero.....dana

[W.k.kortas]

I must, sadly, cop to occasionally (OK, much more than that) falling prey to the siren song of the academic when writing, and I know you have said much about what poetry should be, which is not particularly an exercise in ooh-how-pretty-this-is. I do not think you have ever expressed that more richly, more effectively than you have here. There is life in its sadness, its humor, its folly, the sadness of putting down an old dog, the odd power of backhanding someone, the comic (although perhaps well-heeded, certainly with the current occupant's predecessor) admonition that, as far as the Pope goes, we should "stay as far away from his a*s as possible." To write a poem like this, you have to know more than a little about life its ownself, and then have the rare gift to make it accessible and wonderful.

[h d e rushin]

what happens in the café stays in the café....lol
thank you wk for being patient while I work some things out....love you so much....dana