Difference Between Poems and Poets

Poems toss and turn
and yearn ambitiously
ambiguously: coyly donning,
dropping fig leaves in

the windy autumns of the heart –
on the one hand they
admonish and demand –
and on the other, part

with every expectation
of an outcome – with
an arguably psychopathic
cool capacity for little

textures, small decisions,
surgically precise incisions –
self-forgetting: moments
after bringing things to heat.

Poets are a bit like that
as well, of course, but
they can't, quite to the degree
a poem can, be what they

eat. Poems self-consume:
they are the food they
cook. Somehow gets
the poet off the hook.


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