Cutting Edges

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“Writing another poem about wildflowers is not exactly cutting edge.” ~ Ralph Murre

Okay, Ralph what exactly would

this “cutting edge” poetry be?

A poem about quantum mechanics

might go over well at MIT,

but I can’t find anything to fit

that rhymes with “Higgs Boson.”

When I loaf, like Whitman,

and invite my soul, I quickly fall asleep,

which means my leaves of grass

are still waiting to be cut.

I can’t stand those Deconstructive French

who treat all poems like nutshells to be cracked

down to the phallocentric meat

that they assume must be packed inside.

Now rap’s a contemporary thing,

but needs street cred to write

and I haven’t done a crime

so I haven’t done the time,

and I completely lack

misogynist tattoos,

that are written on my back

a 9-mm gun or a load

of shiny bling.

And so I’m left with this wildflower, Ralph,

the one that looked up from the forest floor

with a question for me this morning:

“If something is beautiful, isn’t that enough?”

Bio:

David Clowers began to write poetry ten year ago with the help of an Internet poets’ group, and he now is a member of the Unabridged group in Egg Harbor. His poems have been published in the 2009 and 2010 Wisconsin Poets’ Calendars, Knock, Fox Cry and The Peninsula Pulse.