is never to give away your secrets
though people will guess
and say you write like the following poets
e.e. cummings Wallace Stevens Richard Brautigan
Ted Berrigan Frank O'Hara
though you'd prefer to be compared to
the Old Possum
and to me you sound a bit like Robert Creeley
who once was embarrassed by me at a party
he died a few years later.
It's easier to talk to you on the phone
after Nebraska which sounds
wonderful when you say it
even with loathing
and "formally innovative"
and "hybrid forms"
and the human being you are looking for
in my poem
because what are we but our words
in the end and what
are poems but perceptions
and who do YOU want to fuck
and how much do you want it
and what are you willing to do
to get what you want and how can you be satisfied
with what you have. Utterly sufficient
to be apart and how you will never say love
before October and I don't mind
or even know what I mean when I say it
whether what defines it is intensity or duration
of feeling or preordained by fate
which pushes us together and draws us apart
the one human voice speaking in all of our poems
what it felt like to be alive
and being in love is most alive
whether it's with the world or you or
poetry. In every aspect
no one resembles anyone
and can you become a poet just by trying
or do you have to go to an impressive school
and how poems are dangerous
when there are real people in them
and nothing is really new but only to you
and you are the most powerful pronoun
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