What You Should Know To Be a Poet (an homage to Gary Snyder)

What You Should Know To Be a Poet

Peaches, plums, lemons, and mushrooms

Slimy, sticky, soft, and sweet

Sprawling wheat fields, golden in the setting sun. You must teleport 20 miles down the road to interrupt it with leaves. dappled bits of magic floating down around you, the underbrush crackling with hidden and forbidden knowledge

Know this: you left your car back at the field

Bile, bending, breaking, blooming

Treetops choking those beneath them, your feet hurting trying to get home.

Home is nowhere, home is here

A stalk, at last, gathers enough strength, by biding its time and saving precious nutrients, and breaks through the soil into open air, only to be crushed by a tin can

Know this: poetry is wilting

You should also know that poetry is metallic

Floating, falling, screaming, smiling

Dead in the water, driftwood, and a sparkling tin can tucked gently under a fern

Eyes cold and wet, heart burning and heavy, seeing is meaning, and listening is quiet. Feeling is believing and warm is the sun as it tries to make you surrender to the flames

Know this: you must remember all you have seen

You must remember your chest filling with fire and your lungs filling with water to counteract, but be wary, the damage increases tenfold when you do.

Your heart once mended, ripped apart anew and left to crawl across the asphalt to find its other half. Parched and sun-seared, it traverses the dry, sandy expanse.

Waterlogged and exhausted, the other scrambles ashore. It finds itself in a tender embrace, with the dry warmth it craves and the soothing wetness it needs.

It will never fully heal, the scar becoming the seed of poetry, watered with tears and raised with love