A poet told me Poetry’s
Exorcism,
A scalpel honed to autopsy the soul,
Spatchcock it on the slab,
Reassign your heart onto your sleeve,
The agony and gouts of blood collateral
To catharsis.
Though I don’t know.
I think, instead, that Poetry’s
Our birdsong,
Just the noise we make
To mark our place and twist our sweet survival
Into beguiling the banal to believe in its
Own beauty,
The way we once would rote injunctions into memory
Through rhyme,
Tie up the tallies with alliterative twine
To keep them safe and close, mumbling
Metrically maintaining our best kinships
And coat the gaucheries of love
In filigrees of glittering opacity.
You know, the same way that we decked
The dullest day to day
With gin traps, babies’ bones and empty curses
Back then when we invented
Our religions.
Until, of course, the poet in us all
Was billyclubbed into the deepest dungeon of
Our bashfulness
With rolled up whips of written words
By grunting gunsels of the Priesthood of the Thieves,
The papyri’s occult ranks of debts and death lists
Providing a initial, wish-thin papering for the cell walls,
Thickening exponentially,
Built up with ledgers of accounts.