POETRY
Who shall sweep
the self-purposeful poetry
all of it? For it is rotten,
like nails, each nail a tooth in
a dead head,
nails loose, each in tins and
boxes on shelf,
they could be men in seats, in
theatre
watching men performing the roles
of men and women,
the poetry like fruit that has
frozen
because a frost has fallen,
and the ground like a mile of
cake,
chalk-white for a square mile
around,
and oranges out of baskets,
decapitated, busts,
half-white, mulatto on the frost
of the grass grey with the contaminant
cold
distributed from the factory towers,
the smokestacks like sticks to
tell shadow
and the time of the sun,
threatened
by the lightweight accuracy of
the computer age
which makes information a
commodity
and boxcars and girders as cheap
as cabbage,
the factory of the gods across
the sky, bandage
to us teeming, clouds and rain
keeping
the filth out, the air in,
porous,
eyes of a beetle, hundred but
minute,
impressive but adding up in mass
to only an eye,
an eye of eyes, like parliament,
and who shall dismember our
poetry?
Like starving boys,
whose swollen liver should be
dished out,
let the many eat the gutty cake
prosperous as bread fallen to
multitudes
and the community of spectators,
the bug’s finger eyes.
Poetry is too clever.
St-Lambert, circa 1983.
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