FREE RANGE POEMS

I have always maintained that the raw material for poetry is all around us but that most of the time we don't realise it. A poet is a person who sees the possibilities and who tries to respond to them. Last Saturday I had the idea that the air is teeming with poems, they circle like airplanes waiting to land. This is what I did with that idea:

Poems Are Everywhere

a complex holding pattern

keeps the free range poems airborne

invisible they circle the world

we are oblivious

every now and then

one of us may catch

a whisper in the ear

a few may write down

the words they hear

and mangle the streamlined form

a fewer still will claim to know

the secret frequency with which

they could guide any poem to the page

but he was sceptical

and simply gave thanks

for every poem that chose him

It's a work in progress. I am unsure if free range adequately describes the natural state of poems in the wild. Also I am not sure if the penultimate stanza works- who are these people, hacks?

I suspect I took the word free range from the news that all free range chickens in the UK have been kept inside so long because of bird flu that they must be reclassified as barn eggs. Things fall apart.

Here is a song by the Mountain Goats that references another bird flu epidemic while lamenting the death of the reggae sing Dennis Brown.

And here is the man himself.

Until next time.