by Jeremy Nathan Marks
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| “Truth/Poetry,” a painting by Cameron Holmes. |
There is nothing quite like knowing
that poetry is your calling
when you’re growing up in a Washington
D.C. suburb where the word is power
for in the nation’s capital no poem passes
laws no verse crafts policy no poem ever
delivered a constituency
Poetry is a gesture so vital
as to be without use
it’s like telling the truth
about the deficit
how we should curb our penchant
for violence Poetry is a useless means
of pulling bounties off wolf heads it is hardly
a writer’s rubber to hatred’s glue
for nothing bounces off of me
and sticks to you
why write a poem to change the world
when you could become a lawyer
or banker
a dynamite maker
whose lucrative investments
bear witness to capital’s power
why write a poem when you could
become a shield to the truncheon’s
bludgeon hear
a bomb’s whistle bullets over Baghdad
or the silence that comes when there’s no one
to listen to the words you’ve just written.
Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. New work appears this fall in Anti-Heroin Chic, Dissident Voice, So It Goes, Chiron Review, Bewildering Stories, The Last Leaves, Unlikely Stories, The Journal of Expressive Writing, Boog City, and Ginosko Review.