In The Garbage Fishing For Diamonds

A poem on writing poetry

I had a few hours to kill before going to work.

So why not appeal to the poetry gods?

Or fish through the garbage pile of the English language

to see if I can fish out a nugget or two?

I might not be Pulitzer material, but sometimes

I get lucky with a metaphor or I’ll let passion take me

into a narrative with nerve and grit and blood and life.

In fact I find if I write what’s close to my chest

the words will come, the images will fall.

I don’t need the best, just something approximate,

something close to what I am trying to say.

It’s just a poem, I remind myself, one of many poems.

It might touch a handful of people, other poets

wandering the wide beach of desolate poetic waste,

passively turning over poems like so many sea shells

or broken sand dollars — ambiguous, half-formed

things that you wonder how they ever ended up

there, sounding like that, in just that pattern of vocabulary,

only to throw the thing back into the sand, no wiser,

as the immense sea drowns out whatever significance

a tiny diamond word may have had that pierced under your skin

interrupting your own daily poetry that runs through your head

like garbage, English riffraff, leftovers, reassembled nonsense

sometimes approaching real emotion only to forget itself like some kind

of dementia, the same way English forgot it was once Latin, or maybe

even Sanskrit, dementia-ridden old man, like some haughty red

bottle brush in love with its own feathery red flower forgetting

its own perineum root is mud deep in worms, mulch, snails, life

as these English words we innocently pluck like kids picking fruit

are only the tip of the iceberg, the froth on a cappuccino

drunk one minute, forgotten the next, flighty whims

most kids would never think to write down or record.

The worst of it is that I think I am the one writing

with two hands on the wheel in control of where I want to go,

driving images and narrative like a detective writer outlining

a fixed plot, when in reality it’s a fifty-fifty fight

my two hands on poetry, poetry’s two hands on me

spiraling into something I never intended, turning

it into a gamble when I hit the publish button

risking a round full of WTFs, or OMGs,

or worse, indifference, a quick click on the back arrow

making your “poem,” your drunken amble down crooked

English lane, only a half read poem at best, ending

at an emphasis you never even intended, half-eaten

fig some mocking bird gave one short sharp stroke into

before flying off to some fruit with more juice, more body,

more melody, sweeter frankly than your accidental

meandering, your opportunistic, shameless spinning just before

work, where you get paid to have shit thrown at you

so you can pay your bills knowing your “poems”

only bring in pennies, knowing you will need

to pen five of these suspect things just to fetch you

a coffee down the street, so you can keep

your caffeinated illusions alive in becoming the next Pulitzer.

© Carlo Zeno 2022

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This poem was prompted after reading Thomas Plummer’s honest piece, We All Start By Writing Badly. He didn’t intend it as a prompt, but it prompted me anyway. Check out his writing, as he is a seasoned, heartfelt poet.

Thank you to my readers for putting up with me, and thank you to Blue Insight for providing a platform for poetry. You can support here, or read two more poems below 🙏