Another chapter in the saga that I refer to as my complicated relationship with poetry… 

1
You open the book
and read until you come to
that one page
with that one poem
that says exactly what you’re feeling

2
After those boring poems
by dead white people
they taught in grade school

and the dense lines
of modern poems
that stretch to infinity

and the ampersand poems
in which and is somehow
the dirtiest of dirties

the poem that says
what it needs to say
without artifice or pretense

is a relief

3
This does not solve anything
but for the duration
you know that someone else
feels what you feel

In that moment
you are together

(23 February 2018)