Every Poem’s Unsolicited Except for the One You Can't Find

Spent part of an afternoon alone
While crowds were consuming the world,
And all you consumed were short poems—-

Old ones, canonical, minor,
New ones, intimate, from war zones—
Trying to sate that same hunger

That has always pushed you to poems,
Throwing them back by the fistful,
As if reading were a taste test,

And you’d lined them up like samples,
Amuse-bouches you filched yourself
From the trays in the kitchen fridge.

You’re racing to get to the one
That stops you, makes you swear softly
To yourself in satisfaction,

This is it, this is just the thing
That a poem should be, that I’d want
A poem to be, that I envy.

You’ve eaten yourself sick this way,
And here’s the thing. Ask any chef—
It’s hard to do with a mouthful

What almost no one manages
To do with a multi-course meal—
To not so much sate as transform

The hunger into awareness
Of an experience never
Previously known and forever

To be sought again, a shudder
In the way the world can be sensed.