A Poetry To Reckon With Poem by RIC BASTASA

My poetry is like stove in the summer

Or fan in winter

It runs against the popular tastes

And has no practical value

Basho

IT IS I TOO

It is I too, I run against authority

I Quarrel with the mayor I Sue the postmaster

I tell my teacher that she’s teaching the wrong thing I even tell my mother that I did not deserve her

(And she cried when I did not regret saying the same statement all over again) .

What is it it me that fans when things are cold that heats when everything is so warm?

To want the undesirable

To desire what cannot be imagined

Of those that do not exist

And get inside where there are no exits

To love the unlovable

To give up something so important and honorable?

To set aside love and love the lovelessness of a meaningless locomotion.

To sculpt from mud inhuman forms

To read that which must still be deciphered

To swallow that which is vomitable

To stay where others wanted to leave

I have a taste for the unpopular

I voted for the loser

To side with the weak

To speak to those with less sanity

To settle for what is unsanitary

To lick despites

To risk whatevers

To go the whenevers

To leave the dead bury themselves

To enter the narrow gate

To light the post in the midst of day

To sail when the winds are too strong

To smile when your loved ones enter the great divide

To wish happy deaths for friends gone by

Empty chairs and empty tables

To spit on these sorts of things

To be myself and yet to be so unhappy

To be so happy and yet not knowing my name

To speak none where my mind is so filled with sense

To be unknowing about what I do know

To be so funny when seriousness demands

To have worked so hard and to die so untimely

To write without any opportunity to be read

All these…. and the senselessness of these all

To be able to say thank you very much

Now that all of you are dead and gone & all I have are empty chairs and empty tables

(In the manner of Les Miserables)

In some pages of nonmindedness

In an island of don’t touch me

This I say I thank you

So Long.