Look, he said Poem by Michael Sharkey

Look, he said,
I've been writing stuff for the past four years
& I've done about six hundred poems
& all I can manage is get them in the local
Literary Society Journal that comes out once a year
in mimeograph.
And that's about six of them.
How come I can't get heard?
It was about the sixth time we've had this conversation,
while I'm sitting there with my back to the venetian blinds
& drinking coffee & staring at him wondering how come
he doesn't just go to a city and get famous
because it'd have to be odds-on that everything he writes
can't be bad, or at least that something must happen
in six hundred pieces of paper covered with stuff about his life
up there at Twenty Seven Biddle Street,
under the High School
near the Park.
I mean, there was a rape there last week;
six guys jumped this lady walking home
and gave her the works so she was just another crazy
and so far no one's said anything in any papers here
because the city hasn't any Women's Refuge,
no Rape Crisis Centre either, & stories like that would only be a hassle
& in any case, as they say here, she probably had it coming to her.
How come if I hear this story from the lady's sister
& I hardly even know here, this guy opposite
can't see what's going on outside his window?
And the beating that guy gave his family last month
just before he went & shot himself
except he messed his eye up so it hung down like stiff jelly
from his face & he was wondering how come he didn't have
another bullet left while everyone was screaming
and the jacks lobbed that his missus sent the kid for on a bike.
If I hear about this stuff, how come he doesn't?
That's the sort of stuff that people want to hear about so they can
say at least it's quieter round here: it must be crazy
living up there in the country.
And there was that guy who tipped a ladle full of white-hot steel
into his boot down at the foundry & got told by his employer
when he came out with a stump and using crutches
that they'd like him to come back and hang around so everybody
at the foundry could observe results of carelessness
and get much more efficient:
that's a human interest story, isn't it?

I said this, and he told me that there wasn't any future
writing up domestic stuff,
since everybody knows life's tough for other people:
that's not art:
poetry must liberate us from the world and sleaze;
our mission statement's how to live inside our heads
with language,
see what beauty we can find.


I said, good luck.