POEM - How I Found what I Wasn’t Looking For

I got lost in the Poetry Foundation website

Searching for a poet I know

Found ten more I didn’t

Then I couldn’t break away

It’s a problem I’ve always had

Only technology amplifies

Accentuates and enables

The inability to tear away

I would head into the library

Just one book was all I needed

But those dang librarians

Put all the books on display

And the horrible publishers

Make the covers so nice and attractive

And my mind suddenly remembers something

A thing I put on the back burner

To burst to the front when I entered the doors

And now it is all right here

I don’t even have to drive

Just click, click, click and another poem and another and another and . . . 

I came here looking for the Kenneth Fearing poem

That one about the funeral

It’s called “Dirge” and it molded me

When I found it hidden

In a collection I bought

In a thrift store in California

Exactly where it needed to be

The entire book was brilliant

Mid-century moderns all together

My favorite, favorite bunch of poets

Stabbing into my subconscious

One unexpected idea after another

So I found Fearing and someone else

On the side of the computer screen

The words said, “. . . But the Little Girls Understand”

I immediately started singing

I know this song, it’s the Doors

But this guy wasn’t writing about that version

He wasn’t writing about the old one either

He was writing about a live version

By the Knack, with Ray Manzarek’s help

Of course that deserves a poem

Of course I was going to love it

And this guy who wrote about it

This Steve Kistulentz guy

We are now best friends

At least for the five or ten minutes

Where I suck it all in

Good words, man, good words

You got it right, just perfect, I like it

Before I get lost in more words

Distracted away by the why

That always brings me in

And the what else that keeps me here