of questions and poetry

I keep asking myself one question. Over and over. What is a poem? To what purpose? You see, since I've been unemployed for close to eight months now, my view of all things has changed. I no longer have the luxury of thinking about luxuries and even the smallest purchase is weighed against its equivalent victual. To the life I knew, the feeling is akin to standing on a dock and watching a great ocean liner leave on holiday, the band is playing, streamers in the air, the languid push signaled by horn, and there you are, feet planted, waving goodbye to a life you used to have, a life your friends still have. And so, the poem? I can't eat it. I can't turn my lamp on with it. It won't protect me from the rain or put a book in my son's backpack. So why do I care to read and write? What is this need that sits alongside hunger and thirst, and, if I am honest, pride and embarrassment, depression and humiliation. I don't know the answer, which makes me smile because it fits the rest of my wardrobe--the longing and need of things not needed that tease me as the whore who dances before my eye but beyond my reach.

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There are days I want to rake leaves as if there were treasure and I were digging; and somehow the self that walked back into the house would be different than the self that walked out, with amatory need, to lade refuse, the hair of a tree into the product of a tree, to put on the curb with no sense of irony, dumb as {censored} stone.

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I see people smiling and I wonder what language they speak; I wonder why we never spoke that language while growing up; I wonder why I struggle so to learn it now. I swear it looks like a foreign language to me; and I don't know how people do it, so many, so naturally. I really do find smiles wonderful, in the way of a fan watching an athlete do things he can't do. And for the life of me, and I've thought on this often, I cannot comprehend or understand why smiling seems so hard, for me, why, when I do smile, the thought is never far from my mind, that somewhere, somehow, someone is about to slap that silly grin from my face.

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The head of a horse is bigger than it looks. As too the eye (look for yourself if you don't believe me). And I wonder if the larger eye is like a larger lens, if it sees more, sees with greater detail and clarity and in the seeing, imagines a different world where a warm day and a field of grass is all that is needed, and even, perhaps, all that is wanted.

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I look upon my kitchen counter and wonder at the fruit--a couple apples, a handful of oranges and one ripening avocado sitting off to itself--I wonder of their fate, sitting as if on death's row, having been plucked from life, but now waiting, not for firing squad or even burial, but to be eaten, devoured, consumed with the most horrible suckling sounds of teeth and lips and tongue upon their ripe, plump flesh. So don't ever ask me why I don't smile in the kitchen. Life has been given so that we might live. I don't see anything funny about it, my skin sunburned from the day's harvest, about as red as the apple in my hand.