Can Poetry Matter?
Can poetry matter, like stone or flesh,
will it bleed or slip flush into walls,
unscrew & screw light bulbs, midwife
a fresh paradigm, slam goose bumps
smack into the crotch of
pimply anorexic girlboys,
will it divert floods, freeze glaciers,
smooth tsunamis, gentle war-lust,
win a Nobel Oscar Idol,
untorture the tortured, torture the torturers
in a paroxysm of insight, incite accountants
to lose count, lawyers to drop their briefs,
Presidents to impeach themselves for the
high crime of believing their own lies?
Can poetry matter in a quantum conundrum
in which even matter doesn’t matter,
in a relativistic non-teleological sandbox
deconstructed in the suburbs
of one of our universe’s infinity of
identical discount strip malls,
penned by a molecule of stink
scribbling wavelike particles
no more permanent than an
electron’s wink?
Can poetry matter if there is no God
if caring about poetry is not caring about God,
if uncertainty means that each time
one person cares about poetry
God pops to the dark side of the moon,
if we don’t need God because God
doesn’t change a God-damned thing?
Can poetry matter solely because
we need to believe something matters
so it might as well be poetry as porn or Paris Hilton,
so we have not bled for no reason,
so that by writing it down, choosing numinous
over luminous, we pull ourselves up by
divine bootstraps, make ourselves complete,
render horror numinous in a couplet.