• Why do black roses and sharp thorns
    Shining knives, red blood, dark moods
    and bitterly unrequited love
    (let us leave out the pain for now)
    make a poem--
    no, that is the wrong question.
    Why do such things make a poem,
    the kind of poem others read
    and ponder
    and think,
    "This is excellence, may I read more?"
    For this may be so,
    but it cannot always be so,
    and if every Jack and Jill
    could tumble down the hill,
    breaking their literary necks,
    and be applauded for it,
    then why should not I?
    Why do I not?

    Here, may I answer my own question?
    I have walked this path before,
    I have allowed the roses and the thorns
    to push their way out of my fingertips and onto paper.
    I have allowed unrequited love to rule me,
    I have tasted the tang of red, red blood on my lips
    and I have endlessly sharpened a kitchen knife.
    I have rode through my share of dark moods, and I ask--
    Why, then, why put it all on display?
    (This is where we ignore the declarations of pain and file them away--
    under P, for pain, and D, for declarations, in the file cabinet)
    I have been there and written it down,
    called it "poetry" and sent it along.
    If you have not seen too much of it,
    you have not read enough.
    There are better things to write about--
    there are better things to rhyme about--
    than the darkness every child will face (will learn,
    has learned, will learn again to know.)

    Here, now,
    a dog barks just outside my window,
    more poetry in his silken fur, pointed teeth, damp nose,
    than in all the pages on which my therapist--
    for three (four? five?) years she has toiled--
    has taken notes on me.