On Being A Poet Among So Many

Trust me,
had I my own way when asked by the Good Lord
what will you be
I'd have awoken in this world a rapper.
At least then, my labor with language
would earn me stuff
which, though meaningless on its own,
would have been validation.

I'd like to say that I would have preferred
to have been born the Poet Laureate
but this is not, I don't think, a determined place.
I would have suggested that I be appointed the position
at birth, like a religious leader or something,
before ever comprehending
orally transmitted noise as
communication.

I do love my anonymity, in part
because the few that do respond
to my work (which is, more accurately),
my soul set free for a spell,
mean that much more to me.

If there is such thing as duality,
then the words that liberate my soul
are, when properly spread,
also the triumph of all the intangible
stuff that I am
over my body.
In short, my words alone cloak my self
and the body is just a vessel, just a monkey of a shell.

Then there is that cloet with that dream.
The one that ends years after my death,
my debt;
when, by chance (or fate?)
the remnants of me that are left
collect all by their own powerless selves
on the shelves of scholars who are finally
yes finally interested in poetry
of the unfabled, unfollowed, retired old ghosts.

Only then, on that day, at that moment,
will the tickle of destiny twitch my resting bones
and I will know, however it is the dead come to know,
that what I was once so sure of
wasn't just bullshit after all.

I imagine myself a member
of an empirically unfit tribe
not even bothering to try
to sell
to the market now worldwide
what no one in their right mind would buy
even if they knew it was the only way to keep
a young poet alive.

They say survive the man, sacrifice his dream,
his shell will remain
and what of him that is lost
which was already unseen
will be unseen still.

Here they are mistaken, however.
An unpaid dream is not a dream killed.
My dreams, at least,
survive on cheap fortunes,
organic metaphysical tasty calories
that anyone could find
if they weren't too busy looking
for all the stuff that's advertised.

Part of my inspiration is exactly this:
To prove that you can find
proof of the divine in the
geometry of time
with space intertwined,

like a web drawn fine
at the full moon's fingertips
reaching deep into a corner
in the attic of your mind.

Ask the designer spider
and he'll tell you too
of some strange things,
so small and unnoticed ever
at all
do manage to survive, after all.

Their design, in this case a web,
is a perfection too common,
too misplaced among the vacuum
piled to the ceiling with...with what
if not nothing?

Ah yes, piled high with abandon.

Stacks of nothing
we ever will want to remember
left like the fly from the spider
buzzing, some might say,
with fight in him,
with symbolic aspirations.

Returning to the point
wrapped already, and captured,

a poet is like all that.
At rest.
Complete in his corner
so long as he can nestle
into at least one attic
of at least one well structure,
fully furnished,
home hot with bodies

and calm,

always calm, eventually,
with sleep.