You Held All Your Words

You held all your words By their little, immature feet Pressed them into dark woolen suits Themes much too old and wise, for their stature With tweezers and brass plated forceps, You castrated them from emotive underpinnings And weighed them for the pure gold incentive of their meanings, Down to the third decimal place; as if it were only science You were doing, after all, without a care for artistry; Or simple beauty, as if cleverness could stand in it's stead What did occur was accidental; like typing monkeys Though you some times would sprinkle on a few drops; An afterthought, in case we were still looking then As if it were all just elements, of a periodic table Of your own devising; and perhaps your poetry's well known now While the rest still perishes, in the well calculated risk of starvation But yours will not be forgiven your indifference; Using helpless things, like some key to minor greatness- The words you racheted together so precisely and firmly Will flow loosely from out the mass consciousness As soon as the pressure's been removed And will gradually reassemble themselves into something lovely A seeded fertility of nutrients, once they've gotten far away enough We were starving on your perfectly worded artisan bread Eating it like some thin, watery soup, with supposition's crackers And all the school children will soon be up in arms Thinking that poetry has died too; They had no idea that you'd replaced it With your own stilted brand of academic dictionary, Because poetry is nothing about learning the alphabet- But it's everything, about leaving it behind.