A Poem Unconcerned with its Significance

15 Jan A Poem Unconcerned with its Significance

[On January 15, 2013]

Maybe a poem won’t do it,

but will you?

I ask, because we all seem to be looking for something
that’s going to
change the world.

We all seem to be so great
at saying what
won’t work.

It won’t be a
presidential election,
it won’t be a
march down Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.,
not even an
English teacher with a ton of passion,
packing poems, problems, possibilities and purpose into
fifty minutes of the most useful education
this little girl or that little boy has ever experienced.

It won’t be
anything anybody has ever done,
because every thing that has been done
has not yet been sufficient

if you let us tell it.

If you let us tell it,
it’s all been a slow death-march
from nothingness toward oblivion,
from chaos to anarchy,
from un-living to now-dying,

and anything we try to do
to make the moment from
to the moment to
any better is the worst possible use
of time ever spent…

Change is inevitable, and
trying to encourage change
is as irrational as
trying to prevent change.

We can’t stop the sun from shining
any more than we can stop Earth from spinning,
nor can we make people do
any more than we can just let them be
[and we know what kinds of problems we have
with just letting people be].
“Don’t do. Wait. Don’t just wait. Expect.
Don’t expect anything, though. It’s pointless.
Expect to be disappointed
if you expect anything.
If you don’t expect anything,
expect to be satisfied.
But you can’t get no satisfaction from no expectations,
so I expect to be waiting on expectations
that are acceptable enough to leave me satiated, at some point, which is pointless, because expectations lead to disappointment.

So what I’ll do

is just point at what you do

and tell you just how pointless it is…
And I can tell you, for a fact,
that this poem isn’t it.

It may be a poem, but
I know this poem won’t do.”

Will you?