Trying Not Hard (or the bullshit poet)

Stumbling from stanza to stanza

in bed at night

and early in the morning –

can’t help tossing and turning into brilliant metaphors

limping from line to line. Unlike the art professor who’s been to the

hostels and underground museums of every city in Asia and Eastern Europe and wants you to know

in every poem he writes

that he can correctly spell the names of all the Greek gods and recite the meaning of every godforsaken city in Antarctica in Latin.

Hiding from enlightenment in punctuated bunkers

might impress pedantic birdbrains and the undergraduate girls that look better than his second wife but

we are never

quite as alive

as we are out in the snow in regular places

the glistening moon snow at night

where you could fucking end it all

by lying down

or sitting Indian style

until no more sentences come.