THE MAN WHO NEVER READS A POEM

It is difficult

to get the news from poems,

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams

The man who never reads a poem must be

a living dead man, closed off from a celebration of words

reminding him of what he already knows, awakening

him, bringing him to his senses

as Huxley’s parrots did in his utopian island,

fluttering about in their rainbow plumage,

exotic pigments of red and yellow

and an occasional genetic fluke of midnight blue

trained to squawk slogans of be here now

such as “Attention!”

If dreams are the royal road to the unconscious,

poems are a gilded boulevard of enchantment.

A Phoenix, a bird of enlightenment soars overhead,

in a mellifluous rhythmic wake-up call

galvanizing the quotidian with memorable

images and word play, gently easing him

out of slumber, capturing a moment or a memory

with an imaginative use of words never seen

or heard before in surprising syntax, lighting

a spark that can “sprout roses and spit bullets.”

An antidote to indifference, poems provide

authentic insight for untangling the vicissitudes

of love and are a divinely inspired light illuminating

the path toward his Final End.