I Hate Poetry
I have tried to like poetry –
its enjambed stares
and the patient writers of it
who toil at their desks,
scribble into black notebooks
in parks with the pigeons
and bread-crumbed homeless
who snore their way to inspiration.
I admit I dated a poet
in an attempt to fall in love with the genre
not the person. I fell in love with
his cologne instead, the zaftig waft
of it behind him, an aura of an aura.
I shampooed my hair in coffee
and drank in the tweed of his sweaters,
as metaphor trudged beyond us,
then took the A-train into an alley
for a mugging.
Now that I am too old
for my death to be sad
I wish for poetry to knock
on my door, let himself inside
and leave a black mountain
of punctuation marks
like a garden of orchids
on the open field
of my neck.
—Jennifer Hill-Kaucher