Poets, guidebooks, and parking lots

You are alone in nothing, who write poems.

What a terrible decision never to be alone!

You feel that you are lone. Liar! Who brought you here if not a writer? Who can stand you but another?

The musician records tracks. The painter blankets the canvas. The writer, aternal, begins. But what can the end be to beginning with friends who never die? I am a baritone (bordering tenor, my mind is clear) to Keats. Should I apologize for no choice? While in amongst all this I choose: I am a guide to Jupiter's pocketbook.

The poet is not the guide to the poet.

The poet is the accident to the guidebook.

The poet is the guidebook falling out of one's pocket into the fire or onto a muddied trail, picked up by a fellow traveler who thinks about asking around at the parking lot for who dropped the guidebook, but hesitates, climbs into their car, and drives home.

What lonely work it is! Writing the poem, reading the same poem.

What can we do but write poems? It's the only thing we can do!

It's the only thing we must do.

LEASH and RELEASE

Let's not fool ourselves.

Whatever we have to say about poetry we are poets who find that we write poems.

We are poets who find or forget that we write poems that recall or forget poetry.

We who forget are not forgotten to ourselves.

Poetry is not a matter. It is not the idea of poetry.

The fact of writing is the being of a poet who, writing, ratifies the first principle.

Poetry, whether written, oral, or visual, is the smell one gives off, whether in heat, being pursued, or as a matter of recollection.

Let's fool others. Sorry, but there's no other way. Poetry offers various platforms for PRETENSE, such as authority, intent, material positioning, and ideology. One dwells in one or another pretense and then finds one writes poetry quite independent of the foregoing.

Ah, well. Spring after all is spring.