At A Poetry Reading

(apologies to Dave M)

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
everyone in the audience
is white. Everyone on the reading list
is white. Everyone, everywhere,
is whitey-white.

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
everyone in the audience
is white, and old. Everyone
is old and white and half the audience
is crippled and old, white and
disabled and old, whitey-white
cripply-crippled and moldy-old
and you are too
so it works for you.

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
the poets and the audience
are white-old-semi-messed up
and luminous with the heat
from their poems and the burning
their papers give off as they light them
on fire and worship the blazes
out of them, or they are glowing
faintly with the cold that’s coming
and they are passing strange people —
these poets, their audience,
their ordered world-view.

Right now
at a poetry reading
somewhere else someone else
is reading or declaiming
a poem or something like one
and it speaks of their sobriety
or establishes their fucked-up-ness
and they aren’t white or straight or whatever
and never wished that on themselves
or anyone else and the manners
the world demands are not clear
and someone from the first reading
still wonders at a poem’s upbringing
and wonders why they are here.

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
a man wonders why he’s there
and thinks hard, so hard
about his cane and his lack of
empathy for anyone at the readings.
He’s not white, not not-white,
getting old, feeling young, only stroke-dinged
a little bit, not fading (he desperately
thinks about himself); he still dreams
about the dragons circling the walls
and the dangers of the wrong President
and the whiff of climate catastrophe
and on and on about his own lack of
empathy — didn’t he say that already?

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
an aging poet wrings his hands
and hangs his head.

I wish
I could write like this, I wish
someone would listen to me,
I wish for a future and a fury
to consume me and take
my poetry to heaven where
it will be consumed,
consummated, remembered.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T