Without Poetry

I must speed a car into a wall

to steer and set a collision course with death.

Or feel the rough, strong hemp around my neck

or necking pills to fill my throat.

These are the methods for facing life,

unsoftened by metaphor or abstraction,

rightly frightened of future or no future at all.

None of these are dressed up in figurative conceit.

Don’t worry, I will be ok, I lie,

more masking again.

Stimming fingers so I feel something

that’s not all in my head. Shorn of allegory,

and disabused of the belief

that poetry can solve a damn thing.

We are only here, all the time, in the present.

No analogy or emblem will comfort the absent anymore.

There is only life and death, and the comfort or no comfort of

what has gone before.