What Poets Know

If I can’t be the poet
Then let me be the pen
Let me feel the weight of words
The curves the edges of their skin
To know the aching joy of language
Lovemaking with truth. The whispered sigh
Turned to life unfolding growing long after
The pen runs dry. There are other pens in the world
Poets are harder to find

Do the poets know?

Do they listen somehow? Do they
Write into the dark? Throw life at the stars
To forget they ever loved the taste of bitter ink
The bloodless paper. The hopeless reach
Into the cluttered bag of itinerate kings
Snake oil salesmen ask tyrannical debts
For the taking from collective noise

What part do I play in this story?
Maybe the narrator maybe not the creator
Maybe just the witness, the Salieri
To life’s colorful Mozart
Unguarded I often find my heart skin soul
Tattooed into Celtic crosses foliated lines
From fallen fragments of the divine behind
The disappointingly human