ARS POETICA

Even if I write of hills roaring with flames
that burn cold and birds that sing to me in greek—
I breathe the smoke— ah the smoke
that carries all the miracles and tragedies of 
centuries past: Lazarus rising from the dead,
the gardens of Babylon, Socrates swallowing 
poison against his will, the invention of trains,
of ovens, Shakespeare writing The Tempest,
quilts covering Washington DC, the Empress 
of Mexico, Tesla, Hyacinthos bleeding flowers,
the women who swept the floors of Versailles 
whose names no one remembers, my birth, Woolf
melancholy, Sylvia Plath writing about Lazarus, Pulse
in Orlando and Disney World, all the writers
who crossed the valley of death, the birds, the fire,
the goat, the Greek, all cramped up in my head.
And so I breathe deeper and deeper, eat it all up
with my nostrils, and when I own all of these selves I—

you will search for a metaphor. An allusion.
A connection between the lines. Who cares
what the poem wants to say. But really that's why I do it; create
these voices, these riddles. I know you will take them
and tear them apart word by word. You become the master,
The conductor of my orchestra. And so this dance
that steps and kicks at my brains finally gets a finale
of kings and queens and elephants and the skeleton
of a spinosaurus, and as everyone dies in the last
pas de deux here come the cymbals, the cannons, the thunder!
There's no curtain call.