Poets

Give me one of the millions of poems thrown out into the ether

The ones conjured up as a salve for the dissatisfied and ravenous hoards

One of those sacrificed by our new and eloquent heroes

Revered, these days, as benevolent wordsmiths, healing souls with profundity

They are everywhere, these new deities of ours

Filling bellies with lines of beauty, and lusciousness, and splendour

Bandaging existences with words of weight, of worth, of nourishment

Give me just one of those triumphs of ink

And I will pen letters to long forgotten gods

With saccharine words of honour and integrity

Prayers on humanity’s behalf, too poetic to be ignored

Instead of writing nothing, and wondering

When I will ever reach those same dizzying heights –

To stop an erratic mind with a sentence?

To melt a world-weary heart with one word?

I want what the poets have got

The status, the adoration, the responsibility

The arrogance of this, the hypocrisy of it, is not lost on me

And it is a useless desire anyway

Because the poets are hoping for the same thing the rest of us gypsies are hoping for

The words on their pages all amounting to the same words upon our reluctant tongues

Ours, unspoken

Theirs, tattooed on the skin of the universe

We all cry out, simply and unapologetically:

 

Love me as I am

 

Love me as I am

 

Love me as I am