Poetry

I have been thinking about the point of poetry. What is the point? Does it change the world? record history? change hearts? help explain? capture a moment of flux? Does poetry make us feel important. A.E. Stallings says on the back of her book: "This is not necessary. This is neither/Crucial nor salvation..../It did not need to happen, won't illumine/The smirch of history, the future's omen./Necessity is merely what sustains--/It's what we do not need that makes us human."

In my response to this and my musings of poetry i have written a poem:

Ode to Life

Sweep the kitchen everyday
Play basketball in the middle of the street
Collect the stringy-haired cats that cry in the night
Learn to make tamales and sell them from a shopping cart
Tear out the broke-down water heater
Run, walk or never go to the bus stop
Feed all your dollar bills to the juke box at the corner store
Eat nothing but chili powder and lime
Do your math homework with a sharpie
Order a large pizza and eat it alone
Write pages and pages poetry
Braid your sister’s hair into pigtails
Yell at your mother in a language she does not understand
Tear up all the grass with your soccer cleats
Break dance, play video games, learn to speak Korean
With your boss at the clothing store
Go ahead and chase the wind
Buy all your fruit from the man who drives the ice cream truck
Read the newspaper
Paint the walls light blue
Listen and watch the helicopters over head
Draw on pages ripped from telephone book
Buy bootlegged movies and watch them again and again
Wash your hair with handfuls of shampoo
Scrub the porch and the trashcans with hose water
Count the spikes on the cactus in neighbor’s yard
Carry your dirty clothes to the laundromat in a backpack
Recycle glass and plastic bottles
Listen to your music until the speakers blow out
Fly to the moon and back again
or stay there for all I care
Do whatever it takes
to lose the key, to forget
the locked drawer
and the gun inside.