Poetry Is a Sickness

- Ed Bok Lee

 

You write not what you want,

but what flaws flower from rust

You want to write about the universe,

how the stars are really tiny palpitating ancestor hearts

watching over us

and instead what you get on the page

is that car crash on Fourth and Broadway—

the wails of the girlfriend or widow,

her long lamentation so sensuous

in terrible harmony with sirens in the distance

Poetry is a sickness

You want to write about Adoration,

the glistening sweat on your honey's chest

in which you've tasted the sun's caress,

and instead what you get

is a poem about the first of four times

your mother and father split up

Want to write about the perfection of God

and end up with just another story

of a uniquely lonely childhood

If I had a dime for every happy poem I wrote

I'd be dead

Want to write about the war, oppression, injustice,

and look here, see, what got left behind

when all the sand and dust cleared

is the puke-green carpet in the Harbor Lights Salvation Army treatment center

A skinny Native girl no older than seventeen

braids the reddish hair

of her little four- or five-year-old Down's Syndrome daughter

Outside, no blinking stars

No holy kiss's approach

Only a vague antiseptic odor and Christian crest on the wall staring back at you

I didn't say all this to that dude who sent me his poems

from prison

You want everyone to feel empowered

Want them to believe there is beauty locked in amber

inside each of us, and you chip away at that shit

one word at a time

You stampede with verbs, nouns, and scalpel adjectives

Middle-finger your literalist boss

Blow grocery cash on library fines

Sprain your left knee loading pallets all day for Labor Ready

You live in an attic for nine years

You go bankrupt

You smoke too much

Drink too much

Alienate family and friends

Say yes, poetry is a sickness, but fuck it

Do it long enough, and I promise like an anti-superhero

your secret power will become loss

Loss like only old people must know

when the last red maple on the block goes

and the drizzle turns to snow

Maybe the best poem is always the one you shouldn't have written

The ghazal that bled your index finger

Or caused your sister to reject your calls for a year

The sonnet that made the woman you loved fear

That slam poem you're still paying for

The triolet that smiled to violate you

through both ears

But Poet, Sucker, Fool

It's your job

to find meaning in all this because

you are delusional enough to believe

that, yes, poetry is a sickness,

but somehow if you can just scrape together enough beauty and truth

to recall, yes, that Broadway car crash was fucked up,

but the way the rain fell to wash away the blood

not ten minutes after the ambulance left

was gorgeous

Or how maybe your mother and father would sometimes scream,

but also wrapped never-before-seen tropical

fruit for one another every Xmas Eve

How in the morning before opting out I watched

that tiny Native girl fumbling

to braid her own and her now-

snoring mother's long black hair

together

                   in a single cornrow—

If I can just always squiggle

down like this:

                                even half as much

as what I'd otherwise need

to forget

maybe these scales

really will one day tip

to find each flaw that made us

Exquisite

from Whorled. Copyright 2011.