Sunday, April 12, 2009

In Response to Your Poems, Including "Wind"

Ah, I am a consummate voyeur.
I read the above and the afore-referred
And all I hear again and again
Is When?

What song served as your soundtrack
The day these were composed?
Which refrigerator-magnet poet
Were you out to beat
When you allowed these words to meet?

How long and how blonde and how straight
Was your hair
What gel, spray or fruit-scented mousse
Held it loosely in place
While that Wind whispered itself into you
And coaxed that one-sided
Smile from your face?

I know you might think it should be enough
For me to see likeness and loveliness
And loving-kindness
And kindred-spiritedness
And I do.

But I also know that these words
Don't belong to any of us now
Or ever.
They belong to feelings that seek us
When songs and partings and
Fluid and dust penetrate our surface
They don't come from
The things that hurt us
But neither pass entirely through.

There was inspiration, and gestation
And a painful crown and birth
On a very specific Earth
Someone was there in the room
With you, when you wrote them down.
Don't expect these words alone to remember
The miracle of their arrival.
You don't own them anymore.
You stand over there now,
(or over here, I don't mind the warmth)
With your inciting moment -
Your consolation prize
While I get to decide
If I will own them too.

2 comments:

  1. hadn't read this since april...but with a re-read just now, i have to say, the thought behind the poem is an intreging one. it means that all my favorite poets and i share words. they write them and i get to decide if i will own them too. ME LIKE-y. keep writing!!! our lives are not our own...they are for us to share (and write about if so led!)

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  2. what happens when we post our favorite quotes in our profiles? we use them to define ourselves but they increase with each new owner.

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