MAKE FREE

MAKE FREE

at the labpur camp
the poets at least
find themselves provided
with a tiny garden
grow some fruit
and vegetables
to supplement the gruel

tending their crops, if
that be the word,
I think I have observed them
persuading themselves
their genre
is pastoral, their
ultimate purpose to
self-reflect nail
down the progressions
of feeling as they
work their way
through resonant
channels
weeding out the noise

articulating the intimate
verbal connection between
inner apprehension and
each
significant onion,
definitive tomato

and
so it was and great
the tributes paid
praise given
joy and
excitement

until the idea of labour
fell into disuse
surplanted
by solutions cleaner, cut
and dried, more
sharply rational

no more poetry and with that
no garden for with this

change of direction what
could be
possible, grow beneath
the
ash

no one saw it coming
I judge them severely

for I have read these onion
tomato poems triumphs of will

of the
human spirit

but nowhere that vision
that intuition, figuring out
exactly where
this
metaphor
was heading

in light of which failure (despite
facility of craft)
have to say that
there is a damned politics
which says
we cannot forgive them

what use
is the poem whose

very existence deceives?