Talk Radio

On the conservative talk radio show he asked me

why I write poems, since no one reads them.

I didn’t like the ironic way he looked at me,

as if the two of us shared a dirty secret.

I wouldn’t have a secret with him for anything.

I wouldn’t tell him about the poems if he tied me up

with an American flag, how the poems and I

look at each other with deeply yearning eyes

as in the old movies that show only a bit

of flesh, a half-second shot

of a finger touching a nipple. How I get excited

at even the thought of a poem,

discouraged when inside it turns out to be

all tensed up, full of itself. How the margins say to me

in their ragged voice, “We could do this

on our lunch hour and no one would be the wiser.”

Stashed / fires thrash / and brighten,

flare into blanks. I want to lick those words.

I would follow them up the dark stairs at noon.

I would never tell him how I love even

the frustration, the secret parts where rhyme upends

or comes back with an unfixable rupture, bent

words almost bleeding in their desperation to repent

and satisfy exactly, as God intended.