Ah, Poetry!

Well, National Poetry Month is almost over, so I thought I'd put up five titles for poems I won't write but that represent me in some small way:

1) My Life With Salami

2) Ode To The Plagiarized Paper That Makes Life So Easy

3) I Dream of Taking a Vacation But Have the House Painted Instead

4) Mom, Missy's Freaking Out

5) NPR, You are Satan and I Love You

Of the above poems, I actually wrote "My Dog Needs a Psychiatrist" several years ago. Missy's still as obsessed with me now as she was then. It's a strangely comforting feeling.

Here's a real poem by a real poet, Alicia Ostriker:


JERSEY TRANSIT

i
That black woman with the extraordinary earrings
Haranguing that black man about the contradictions
Of society, challenging his premises, she's
Been doing it since the freezing Trenton platform
Where the rest of us shivered and looked at our watches.
Doctrinally correct, but
He's tired from work and
He's just been helplessly viewing her breasts
The whole trip between Trenton and New Brunswick.

ii
Father and son in the aisle, the man's
Mouth is hair-thin; nose too; it would seem he exercises
Much control. He is pointing something out
Among the grimy smokestacks of Elizabeth--
Telephone wires? A church? His boy looks aside and says:
"Forget it, dad."

iii

The elderly passenger, the young conductor, negotiate.
The old man puts his
Change in his pocket, leans back
Against the seat and picks his teeth.
The train rattles along, making us all
Fall half-asleep.
Over the brown Jersey horizon the World Trade Center rises
Like a pair of angels
Or a pair of gigantic tusks
And soon the train will dive into the tunnel, emerging
As if newborn, into the mammoth
Starlit City. The young conductor
Comes back again and touches the man's shoulder.

Written in 1989, when the NYC skyline was quite different, Ostriker's poem is something like the poem I think I should write when I take the 167 into the city. I doubt, however, that I will ever write a poem about the NJ Transit. I have written a poem about NYC and here it is:



I Heart New York, Sometimes

On the subway great necked men bend
over their sandwiches, read the Koran,
make the train a house of prayer
while three rails hum beneath us.

This city’s delinquent steam and wreck pulled
out of itself. Uphill in only occasional ways,
it slides not much from cable onto drip coated pylon,
breaks the backs of men who make it shine.

Jesus in miniature hangs everywhere, buffed glossy
with the love of old ladies’ rubbings
in salted bodegas on the edge of the park.

This city's absurdly tilted, disheveled: it's a fire sale
fed when the members of a hundred stunted
alphabets come and go daily, when it’s easy to ride under water.




So, what are some poems you won't write?