ManicDDaily

On Being Prompted To Write About Poets’ Becoming, But Faced With Butter

Before me sit
two nipples and a cunt,
little pats of molded butter shaped
like daisies (the nipples)
and a rose–

These are not
why I became a poet
for I never had butter
till the 4th grade
when, at the home of a friend whose mother was French,
I woke up, exclaiming the smell.
The woman melted it
in her crepe pan,
remembering how the swirled cast iron
(as big as the world
bred with a daisy)
was the one thing she’d grabbed, running
from under rafters
during an earthquake–

but I just don’t feel a poet,
no matter the mold
of the butter,
poets being people who find,
like a beating pulse,
the interstices along time’s chain,
those blue beads of language imprismed
(though producing nothing so obvious
as a rainbow)
while I tend to get lost in the forest of narrative
(rarely seeing the forest
for the trees–)

I don’t even typically eat butter
having been molded by a childhood
in which I had none till the 4th grade
though I was granted nipples,
all right, and the you-know-what,
and too, a mind willing to bead with sweat
if not able to cast
transcendence,
certainly not into anything that might fit
inside a mouth, much less
not melt in it.

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Here’s a rather odd poem for Anthony Desmond’s prompt on dVerse Poets Pub (http://dversepoets.com) about one’s evolution as a poet. I confess that I do not feel like a poet! I am a prose writer mainly! But I do like poetry. Thanks, Anthony.