Trouble’s in the First Line

No, you don’t really dislike it.
It’s what ordinary people,
Those who say they loathe it, never

Read it, turn around and try to
Compose, whenever some horror
Or extraordinary joy swamps

Their own lives’ oil-slicked little boats.
Prisoners, soldiers in trenches,
Metropolitan citizens

Dazed in some attack’s aftermath,
Neighborhoods still covered in ash,
Will turn their grief to poetry,

Reaching after words that hammer
Anguish through others’ consciousness,
Awls to draw tears and blood. Not prose.

When you were in love, when your veins
Choked with those limerent hormones,
When you couldn’t eat, sleep, or think

For being so carried away,
Suddenly you tried poetry,
And if you burned it later—so?

Everything burns, sooner or slow.
Far from being immortal, poems
Only seem so when they survive

Longer than memory’s mayflies,
Longer than ordinary lives,
Longer than they ought to, than prose.