Poets

Poets

Do not listen to the hunting dogs

baying in dark woods, or the black

flies buzzing around in your head

remembering long dead friends.

 

Poets have done this before

and they’ve wandered off

alone and unheard of to bury

the caul of their own stillborn.

 

Every time I open a bottle

of red wine, the bad moon

dowses blood from the virgin’s

stone thighs and I think I am

handsome, young and drunk

again, eternal as a weed.

 

Poets have made love and gathered

at the cheap joints, cutting their fingers

toasting one another, curse words

hidden deep beneath low breaths

and the noise of a singer’s raspy voice.

 

They’ve gotten cold feet

at the crucial moments when

left alone with somebody, a student

with the saddest blue eyes.

 

Poets have done this before,

I assure you my friends.

 

Every time I see another young man

tucking a gun in his waistband

I want to forget that this is our society now

I want to just forget it and drink

or have a seat brother, talk to me

for violence is the silence of one more voice.

 

Poets have done this before

I have seen it behind dark eyes at night.

 

We are but dust under the hooves

of horses running side by side

with the fog, thinking all that moves

is for us to write something new, like light

that shines for the lonely bone moth.

 

Poets have done this before.

 

I know it like the cigarette holes she burned through my tablecloth

on those cold nights we spent writing

like her cough I could hear, so long

a time ago, I’d rather not remember.