Daily Poem, July 3, 2009 (posted 7/4/09)

Rant Hits Daily Poem Circuit

Keep going, I tell my students, keep going, push past the place that feels like a tidy ending, keep putting words on paper ‘til you’ve wandered off the path, down a side street, witnessed a bar fight that spilled outside, and seen a pair of men kissing goodbye while they each hold a briefcase a-kilter, and the pedestrian signal has started counting down from 10. Write until a troll crawls out from under the bridge you’re walking over, and offers you one wish which you have to use by midnight, and suddenly you realize how one wish is never enough, because as soon as you make it you realize you needed to think bigger than you did. Write until you get past that predicament and realize one wish is better than no wish and it’s okay if you didn’t think outside the box. Write until the wish comes true and you’ve ended world hunger or stopped the human proclivity for making war, or reversed global warming, or you’ve received your flame orange Porsche which attracts state troopers everywhere. Write until you have a cramp in your hand or your pen’s out of ink, until your mother and father come back from the dead to remind you to do something useful with your life and you get to show them how you stopped the people in China from starving because you met a troll on a bridge and they say, Look, we’re from the other side and we can tell you, there’s no such thing as trolls, and you remind them it was them and all those bedtime readings that gave you the idea in the first place, and anyway, you ask them, does it matter how I did it as long as there is now World Peace? And maybe you mother says, but Jesus told His apostles, The poor you will always have with you, and now you’ve gone and messed it all up, and maybe your father asks, But what about the Marines? You mean there won’t be any more Marines? I was a Marine, he reminds you. And you say, Nope, we won’t need them. Then stop writing, before he can say another thing.