my wife’s coworkers ask about my poetry

and I tell them oh,

it’s slice-of-life kind of stuff.

Bird on a wire kind of stuff. They ask

but what are they about? and I tell them so,

they say that the only philosophical question

worth asking is whether or not to commit suicide.

I guess my poems are all questions

that don’t have answers yet.

and I made things awkward again.

One of them asks if I’m active

at the university poetry center and I say no,

but I know a few local poets.

We don’t really like each other much

and everyone laughs.

I tell them that all the modern poets

have cut marks on their thighs.

I tell them to look for the scars.

That maybe the old ones had them too

and it’s the skirts that got shorter.

That the ones who survive today get tattoos

over their wrists to hide the failure,

how no one’s proud of their scars anymore.

I tell them that an old poet friend once said

that every artist is either overcooked or under-easy

and that I always forget to turn the oven off.

That I used to give my poetry books to all the girls

I wanted to touch, like a preface for my hands,

and when I first met the girl

who’s now the woman I’m married to

I gave her my poems and she came to my apartment

and found me playing PlayStation,

chainsmoking drunk, and she said I really thought

you’d be more in touch with nature, then how

I took her hand and dragged her fingers

across the scars on my biggest organ and said

do you think I got these hugging a tree? just in time

before dinner arrived.

————————————–

Joshua Lillie called us from Tucson, AZ.

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