Poetry is not my life

Ferllenghtti sits perched atop the bathroom radiator

And I savor a page every time my body recycles

Thanking God for the openings and the hollow places

And the subtlety of uncapitalized letters

Though a dozen boxes of notebooks with scribbled fragments of verse

will crush you if you attempt to open my closet door

Poetry is not my life

Though there was a time

When I left my cozy air conditioned world

rode a beat up bicycle to the dangerous part of town

Picked through dumpsters to find relics of reality

Searched for poems in the broken glass under the train tracks

Talked to old folks, whose bodies reeked of ten varieties of decay,

Whose untreated wounds had festered, discolored,

Whose rotted teeth clicked a different rhythm for each tale,

The young people called me ain’t from the ghetto

And that, too, I made into a poem

Poetry is not my life

What is?

Let me begin by saying that I’ve changed a thousand diapers

A real man changes a thousand diapers

But my beloved changed two thousand

So I best not open my mouth

Poetry is not my life

I pay bills for natural gas

I insulate the attic – it’s itchy

I work in front of a computer screen

I wash out the thermoses from the kid’s lunchboxes

Poetry is not my life

Thank God I have money

I like those English water crackers with a slice of fancy feta cheese

And my children have health care coverage

And I can do my laundry in my basement

When you have too little or too much

Money plays with your mind

Since I have some money

Poetry is not my life

My life is taking the shortcut through the tire store parking lot to catch the train

My life is trying to change the world by making minor adjustments

My life is trying to get my kids to finish their Cheerios

Oil changes

Dental appointments

E-mails

And though I wish I could end with irony

Poetry is not my life