Poetry

is an agnostic maundering through a church.

He wears chapped lips, sinner’s lips,

lips guilty of kissing too many little-black-dressed girls

in dive bars bathroom stalls; the hands that ran along their asses

with the same calluses on his palms tie knots: slipknots and shoelaces,

wedding knots. Men pushed in front of moving automobiles

look up to the curb and see Poetry, laughing himself to tears

because he never works, never gets up in the morning, toils to come home

to the kitchen table, the one with no yellow tablecloth and polished silverware.

Poetry is a man who celebrates in four-star fast food halls

where everyone stays sober until they can’t

drink anymore and at the end of the night

he buys a round for everyone: four parts disorder

and one part futility, with just a hint of aged white whiskey.

Poetry has grown old. Become a secular hedonist, laid in state

(open casket) and his procession is lit by lunar-powered streetlamps

and the headlights of mourners riding by, waving

from red wheelbarrows. His widow reads prayers from the Torah.

A choir sings. Poetry is people staring at Poetry,

the godless, loving bastard, as he walks in to pray for himself.