PARRIED ENDLESSLY
If poems can't slug it out
with kids and mayhem and shopping life
overdrafts and broken cars and jobs
they're not worth shit: of course
sometimes it's necessary to be sleepy
and on that day a sleepy poem is the true poem
Sometimes one is filled with questionings:
The Grand Canal
Endless Life
Difficulties and Exultations
The Wasted Land
Friend
The Piano
Rationality
Paradise Regained
but these are only the answers
and they're not of much use
It's the spaces between the blocks of words
we love and inhabit
The anticipation of what's coming next
neither empty nor silent
Your expectations seem to be eternally denied
You think that's bad
but it's not bad
though we're given to understand it's necessary
—Martin Stannard
____
First published as part of the sequence "Arising" in "Writing Down The
Days — New & Selected Poems" (Stride, 2001 — www.stridebooks.co.uk)