My Soul Is Not Poetry

My soul is not poetry inside of it and it is nothing pretty; My insides are dead, rotting rhododendrons beside a rusting pitch-fork inside a barn, deserted for the last fifty years and too dangerous, to ever go into. But if it could go inside, My un-poetry'd soul would hop, crawl, and climb, in spite of its lameness up the rickety old ladder, to the hayloft, And there eat the little green apples, already wormy from the gnarled tree, outside the window. My soul would peer out the window and look for any signs of the once-life that used to abide here- To feed it's ravenous hunger for poetry and then develop the unavoidable belly-ache. Of course, I know lots of others whose soul is not poetry, either; And we are all trying to re-light the same matches once struck by people, who had flames burning them inside Which they dutifully copied down onto damp, tear-stained pages; (so the words would not burn up the paper) And then there were the copy machines, and printing presses, to duplicate their fires- Like carrying a bit of coal to the next door, and the next one so that everyone could have a bit of fire in Winter. And the thick water, of all the world's approbation soothed their old, weeping wounds While the rest of us not-poets huddled around not-fires in cold deserted barns, and picked fresh flowers every day So that we could earnestly watch them die all over again, each day, and pronounce it poetry, while nobody noticed how many words we managed to hemorrhage out.