Just A Poem

A poem is not important.

It’s just a goddamned fucking poem.

It doesn’t kill the president or save a life.

It’s a bunch of words randomly thrown

around a room, across a screen, changing nothing,

helping nobody, and then, after you hear it once

in a noisy club or read it twice in a smelly book

it dies, like an elevator greeting or a subway hello.

Lots of people have written me poems and songs.

So many, that I could publish a lengthy volume

of all of these poems and songs written just for me

and then I could take it home, and I could sit there,

alone by the window, reading them all to myself.

Or, I could find a living person who doesn’t write

poems and we could sit on the couch together

and watch television and eat macaroni and cheese

and Ring Dings and grow fatter and more comatose

every day, staring at flickering images and suffering

from the lack of all the goddamned stupid poems

even if they never ever change a fucking thing.

Puma Pearl - New York, NY