No place for poetry

I make the critical error of talking about poetry at work with Melissa and them I’m fucked, surrounded as I am by paper clips, message pads, minutia and my own ennui. Talking about poetry and art and ideas at work can actually hurt when you aren’t a poet or an artist or a scholar – they make you forget your place, or maybe put you in it.
From about the age of 11 I used to meet my mother in the kitchen at 3:00 am (I come from a long line of practiced insomniacs) and sometimes we would trade poems. We would read each other our favorite passages and thrill at the sharing of the words and the cadence and that perfect truth expressed by another human that made us feel somehow finally understood. This was wonderful. I would go back to bed and think, “I never need to sleep again.” I would be full of racing thoughts and images and fleeting snatches of perfect understanding that I would never, ever, be able to communicate later.
The time for poetry is Saturday afternoon - when the house is clean, when you can make a long-distance phone call that inadvertently lasts 6 hours, when you can drink too much and say too much and then apologize and sleep it off. Poetry is a distilled and spare and heady truth that may cause me to quit my job or never, ever, sleep again.

In no order other than that which comes from my fingers now: Yeats, Emily Dickinson (and for being a shut-in), e.e. cummings (and for using all lower case), Michael Ondaatje, Charles Bukowski (and for staying lucid long enough to write any of it down, for not losing the scraps of paper under the sofa and for the title “Play the piano drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers begin to bleed a bit”), and all the others - recited to me haltingly by impassioned others, or read to me by my mother at 3:00 am. Thank you.