Where is your poetry?

Where is your poetry?
Where does your line break between thoughts of the onion that you finely chopped into your omelette, nearly missing your finger, and the man that you julienned and stuck beneath the floor boards.

Where is your poetry?
Oh, that my heart could make a sound louder than the constant battle cry of drums in my ears, I would play a symphony in my chest.
You, my sweet fly, morsel of life, you know no better than to be lured in by the soft and gentle humming of the violin.
But as the race of flies is so often deceived, you will soon come to realize that the violin sound is merely my spider leg rubbing against the delicate web trapping that I have set for you; so often in these times it is too late to revoke the world of symphonic tenderness that you thought awaited you. Instead I get to feed on the soft tenderness of your sweet soul. Please don’t blame yourself, I am far too prideful for you to take credit for such a feat.

Where is your poetry?
Where are your beats? Have they changed so quickly?
Where, where, where, is Allen?
Where is Charles?
Where is William?
Where is the dusky room in which they all ejaculated great words of history into the air?
Spewing change and profanity
The bits of ash from their cigarettes dancing around as bits of dust through early morning light.

Where is your poetry?
The young man sitting in his desk at school,
Unsure, timid, unspoken to
He has the pencil, the paper.
He draws himself through the lines of the college ruled sheet into the rules of college.
He thinks that rules apply only to those who have the cowardice to think that they hold capital-T Truth somehow to an all encompassing universe.
He claims solipsism as his philosophy of choice, and sucks his way down to the bottom of a bottle while walking his way up to the top of a roof.
He says, “whatever I don’t see can’t be there, can’t hurt me.”
He turns around.
He leans back.

Where is your poetry?
Landing on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, he contemplates if the girl in his eighth grade English class will ask him to Sadie’s.
He turns back the chapters of all the books he has read, from end to beginning. He forgets the hatred that he was taught was right.
When he’s eight the bruise fades off of his face at school for two weeks before the red mark is finally removed by the boy with the backwards hat’s fist.
He laughs backward more and more frequently before that.

Where is your poetry?
To the killer of childhood memories,
Disdain is the only response. If we lose for even one moment and begin to forget,
then we will cease to remember some aspect of who we once were, progress is not measured in the amount of steps you take,
but by the fact that you kept taking them,
and if we can’t remember our first steps,
upon stopping, how will we ever know that we can start back up again?