The Instrument

Who reads poetry? Not our intellectuals; they want to control it. Not lovers, not the combative, not examinees. They too skim it for bouquets and magic trump cards. Not poor schoolkids furtively farting as they get immunized against it. Poetry is read by the lovers of poetry and heard by some more they coax to the café or the district library for a bifocal reading. Lovers of poetry may total a million people on the whole planet. Fewer than the players of skat. What gives them delight is a never-murderous skim distilled, to verse mainly, and suspended in rapt calm on the surface of paper. The rest of poetry to which this was once integral still rules the continents, as it always did. But on condition now that its true name’s never spoken: constructs, feral poetry, the opposite but also the secret of the rational. And who reads these? Ah, the lovers, the schoolkids, debaters, generals, crime-lords, everybody reads them: Porsche, lift-off, Gaia, Cool, patriarchy. Among the feral stanzas are many that demand your flesh to embody themselves. Only completed art free of obedience to its time can pirouette you through and athwart the larger poems you are in. Being outside all poetry is an unreachable void. Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment. For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike down along your writing arm at the accumulated moment. For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond your own intelligence. For not needing to rise and betray the poor to do it. For a non-devouring fame. Little in politics resembles it: perhaps the Australian colonists’ re-inventing of the snide far-adopted secret ballot, in which deflation could hide and, as a welfare bringer, shame the mass-grave Revolutions, So axe-edged, so lictor-y. Was that moral cowardice’s one shining world victory? Breathing in dream-rhythm when awake and far from bed evinces the gift. Being tragic with a book on your head.