If You Want

If you want to 

find a way to understand

poetry, you can not simply

read it from the page - inside.

You have to take it back

to its pre-verbal roots,

sounding at once in the back

of your brain, in your heart,

among your loins, and across

your lips.  Word by word,

by word.  A vibration

that echoes in the soul.  

Speak it outload and feel 

where its origins lay.  Break 

it down into bits and snippets 

of cadence and meaning, 

moving up and out of

you along your long vocal cords.  

Say it.  Say them. Croak it. 

Croak them. Let it, let them 

ring that others may grab after

them and try to repeat their 

resonance in themselves like 

a Paul Simon or Bob Dylan song.  

You have had an affair with poetry 

for a long, long, long time, but 

you had no hint it was going on.  

It is because it grew up and out 

of a lush and bountiful world of

artists on the stage of the world and

airwaves of the 1960s.  

If you could just remember 

that those songs were poems, 

you would never just read the words 

silently inside of your self.

You would repeat them again, and again,

and again, letting them find a home on

the wind and in the sun that others may

repeat them aloud.  The words.  The

poems.  Themselves.

Always aloud.  Always aloud.  

Always aloud.