ars poetica

Yellow Bastard Between Teal Lines

Can any body out there ever
really hear me, not like the cat
hears me with eyes I
know are not about me?

I have a new friend who knows it all,
A lover I once had lots of sex with

(oh, how even here, when
I’m trying to be the one to listen to myself
I craft - can’t stand long with that preposition
I ended with will also end with
purposefully here to end with)

A shaman woman
woe’s man who helps freely then
shatters like a bubble
pricked by turnabout

(this uncertainty principle is impossible)

Cast your fate to the wind not
to friends the ones who poker and chess
One can josh but will only be serious about business

(“never do business with friends”)

The other, after games, prefers only reality T.V.
Another woman friend either hides from the world
or is too much in it, how like my friend who
having found enlightenment,
isolates in the desert but only because it’s cheaper there.

A new friend who loves the arts
totally active full of bright intensity
will not abide my shadow.

Then there are the poets
their community of terminal self-absorption:
Who broods over the poets but the poets?
Speaking for myself
what I seek from poets
is
my self
reflected

Am I the first poet to find Narcissus
winking back from the pg.,
yellow bastard between teal lines?

(yellow negative space – some use white-lined notebooks
I use yellow legal pads)

Better to stop this scribbling
now
Stare into the yellow void
Seek your most intimate
friend

—Ed Coletti

What Michael Richards Couldn’t Know About Poets Either

Poets are ferocious
dogs holding themselves
on short leashes
skinny kids on beaches
big animals within
kicking sand in their own faces
burying the poet’s head.

(makes me wonder about poets
who write sweetly of red roses)

When that insecure cougar
springs out from my rib cage
I too am freed to suffer
my singular oppression.

—Ed Coletti

—Ed Coletti
____
previously published in Kickass Review – Vol. VI, no. 6 - 2006

The Notion of Wings

It’s the notion of
wings, that’s what it is
More like flight the concept
or flying, a verb
Have you ever flown a verb?
Poets and lovers fly verbs all the time.
It’s the exhilaration, that’s what it is
straddling the latest verb soaring
bareback rider rodeoing space
landing with a thud, hard realization
rodeoing now requires redoing.
Shake off the stardust, mount up anew.
It’s the notion of wings and flying the verbs
That’s what it is.

—Ed Coletti