Some learn,
Early on,
To prostitute their verse.
So, in all the waking hours
They scavenge for a simple simile
That matches requirements, fulfills needs. 

Like they say, poetry opens the doors to show you the possibilities. Sometimes you get it, otherwise you increase the count and say “Yeah, I’ve read it”. Like I read Marquez. And the latter is better for a long and happy life, to have grandkids and all 🙂 Have fun then!

Ok..last question…is there a happy poet?

Meena Kandasamy writes, (she blogs here)

One story for a hundred poems.
One lie for a hundred sad truths.
One fake smile to this world for a hundred secret, bloody, unhealing wounds that I cannot dare to show the world outside.

Will you not forgive me?

If you loved me enough, you will.
If you loved me greatly, you will take me there more often.
If you loved me as if nothing else mattered in the world, you will pull me out of poetry, until we fall into it, together, irretrievably.

She says “If any incident is capable of affecting me, then I live with that. I think over it, keep chewing on it, allow it to make me distracted, let it ruin my life for days on end, take it to bed and see it in my nightmares or wish-fulfilling dreams, talk about it to anyone who cares to listen, and someday, sometime, when I am sitting down, I have written a poem. Poetry should capture the heat of the moment, but there is no necessity that you write it like an instant transcription.”

And we all make prostitutes of poems, don’t we 🙂

How they Prostitute a Poem – Meena Kandasamy (from here)

It is uniquely easy
For some to sell
Ideals because
Business of absent
Goods is essentially
A sacrosanct
But mostly
A flimsy transaction.

Some learn,
Early on,
To prostitute their verse.
So, in all the waking hours
They scavenge for a simple simile
That matches requirements, fulfills needs.

They barter reality
And every romance
To a blurred triplicate
Carbon-copy World of Hard
Cash and Price Tags and Brand Names.

In this brothel
Of stilled hope and
Stagnated stories, poems
Are born virgin and endowed
With voluptuous figures of firm,
Full breasts and wide hips where men
Prefer to plant their pastime dreams,
Or conceive their seed,
Or merely spite themselves,
Or dabble at domination.

But, the poem,
With this bogus
Existence becomes
An adept, untiring prostitute.

Taken
On a starry night,
The poem opens
(dry and drab and dreary:
lacking love and life) like
The paid-for parting
Of the thighs.