[New-Poetry] "Shop Talk I"

[jforjames at aol.com]

A fun poem, Jim..., or '12. Reading should be like writing, only better.'

Did people see this one in APR by Hoagland, Jim's piece made me think of it.
Finnegan
--
I Have News for You


There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood


and there are people who don't interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.


There are people who don't walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures irrecoverable


and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings


do not send their tuberous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others' emotional lives


as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;


and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
unpacking the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.


Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you,


who do not yearn after love or fame or quantities of money as
                                               unattainable as that moon;

Thus, they do not later
                   have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.


Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.


I have news for you:
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room


and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.



--Tony Hoagland, APR, Mar/Apr 2007 

--
Shop Talk 
 
1. Don't cheat on your images by having an affair with a conceit. 
 
2. Sell your metaphor and get a real house. 
 
3. For leaner meals, write your shopping list in rhyme. 
 
4. A sestina on the coast, a 100 horsepower sonnet, the spray of free verse: it 
  doesn't get any better than that. 
 
5. When the barometric pressure goes down, some poems begin to leak. 
 
6. At welding school, sparks fly and images fuse. 
 
7. The ozone layer thinned above the poetry slam. 
 
8. A moving poem is ridden by every Tom, Dick, and Harry. 
 
9. The poet laureate read a poem about a slice of bologna between 
  two slices of Wonder Bread. The final couplet supplied the mayo. 
 
10. Despite the odds, a cliché grew up to be a symbol but did not run 
for office. 
 
11. Do you look in the mirror every day and ask, "What do I mean?" 
 
12. Reading should be like writing. 
 
 
-- Jim 


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