What I Do Not Give For Your Critique

Stop what you’re doing,
you say.  
Give us more
wordplay, more
rungs in
the poem ladder
to climb,
more attention
to rhythm and rhyme.

For the moment I’ll oblige,
but know this: I prefer
to concern myself mostly
with the music of
everyday, pull my beat
from speech
whose music
would otherwise be
left behind; 
no time
to pretty up
the daily yawp.
No passion
to smash it into
a mold.

If you call me
crazy or stubborn,
I’ll just stare you down.
Motherfucker,
what I am
is old.  

I’ve got good Goddamned underwear
more seasoned
than your notions of what
is good and valuable to speak
and write;
and if you offer me your whine,
your crap about not wanting poems
about poetry, I’ll spit indeed,
but it won’t be pretty
and it sure as fuck won’t rhyme.

Listen:  this is church to me,
my best self in spiritual action.
This is where I stack the deck 
in favor of drawing to ecstasy,
where I bring the mystery to inquiry,
where I find myself staring back 
at myself.  It’s the place I find
the most, the place I dig the most.
Sometimes, rarely,  I am seized 
by the need to honor that
and I write about that…

so.  Here’s the rat, 
and here’s the rat’s ass
that I do not give
for your objection.

You get to my age, maybe 
I’ll hand it over to you,
if you still think that way,
if you still want it.