On Reverdy Road
They like poetry that isn’t.
Not the kind that wakes into you
the way eyes gleam candid
in shadow, untrimmed wicks,
or that you grab from casual breezes
barehanded at dawn. When
don’t the words in a poem
count? When they fall into a pit
and Dear Reader goes tumbling after.
—Barry Schwabsky
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from the sequence For Despair, published as a chapbook by Seeing Eye Books, Los Angeles, 2005.