Poetry will ruin your life

some of us many of you
love poetry as blackboard
and no chalk, toe nails and back flips
through a bent H
and screaming rocket calculus
as numbers pounding at the door
when dinner arrives,
saying
"fuck you and your attempts to
define poetry, you are squares
TOO EASILY DEFINED
and remember
JAMES BROWN IS DEAD."

too many of not enough of the rest of the city
believes parades are for them
if it's the third tuesday in a leap year
on a day named after a Norse god, goddamnit,
but some of the majority of the slim pickings
have opined
that newspapers are dead to everything
except the bottom of a
bird cage so therefore
poetry is the attempt to make language
an even crustier clump of cliches and dead mackerals,
line breaks
needed plaster casts,
similes that cannot find a soul mate,
genders and pronouns
unpronounced by married
inspite of the loneliness
that finds you like
that helicopter spotlight
that very night when
you slam your poem
across the side of the head
of a famous coot
who rhymed
like a trained seal
does
when the fish smells like
The Star Spangled Banner.

Every single every other of us still standing if not sitting or what have you
sigh and don't regard poetry at all
because
"PEOPLE ARE DYING. GODDAMNIT, CRAZY FUCKERS
THINK THEY CAN JUST UP AND LEAVE WITHOUT
A PARTING GIFT OR A LAST SLAP AGAINST THE FACE"
but poetry absorbs all this
what ever hoarse voice and harsh verbs that choose us,
guitars ,harmonicas and bicycle bells
are the sound track makes that big racket
against the black night air,\
the big black board scratched by stars
and smeared with
ashen tears as spirits rise and voices cry
and finally something like a song
of loss emerges and our hands come from our pockets and from behind our backs and we raise to the
nowhere that is our idea of heaven
and mourn the loss
and remember the joy
and write a poem in
between a toss of the dice
and a the release of breath
that it's always closing time
somewhere
on the planet that rumbles on , spits out gears, shivers and quakes with it's organic mechanics festering
the ground with spores and seed,
gas tanks go dry
and there isn't a dry eye
with so many miles still untrod
and sleep coming over us all the same,
cooing, eschewing the rules and agendas,
crooning a lyric, a word of every  song
you knew only half the stanzas to,
it all says
that it's time to rest,
it's time to come home
it's time to become the poetry
that was your pulse
and is now your name
when someone
new decides to get good and pissed
and full of themselves
in the life they find themself in.