A Poem Insisting to be Written

This is a difficult poem that insists itself

to be written. You think of the manner

of calisthenic attack as you walk in circles,

one at a time, with another reluctant

poet who thinks about his private God

in the syllables of sin. I do not, of course,

believe in the mortality of words

nor in the finiteness of verses

and so I say, these are all the same:

the poet in his manner of skewed

seeing of the world, the witty rebel

in his skewed seeing of the word,

the prophet in his skewed seeing

of the world worded. And so I tell him,

this reluctant poet who does not trust

paradoxes nor the back gray of light

in darkness: they are all the same,

these, the meanings playing a pun

on language, seeing how the eye

sees itself with all these ruses,

one tricky phrase at a time

until the whole thing becomes

a stanza of our grief. Poets are lonely

people, I offer, saying this to him

to console even as I say the same thing

to myself. But they are most happy,

too, in their loneliness. We walk

another round in one inner circle

of our courage or creative rage

or whatever that you call

these feelings we have against

all that oppresses like verses

unable to identify themselves

if they are stanzas of pretense.

It is night, it is the Wednesday

with no sense, the flood lights

bathing our evening steps

to make the first move

and another first move

to think about what we want

whether to write a first poem

or resist writing one while all along

we have known the poetry of injustice

in this land where we have our

dreams deferred, dispersed.

A Solver Agcaoili

Manoa/Oct 28, 2009