1. Great poets keep soft palms.
There’s no poetry
in working your hands
until the skin calluses
to wood and you
can sharpen your fingers
to pencil points.
2. Great poets are professors,
accredited by
universities
even ears deafened
by construction sites
or screaming engines
have heard about.
3. Great poets are clean,
their criminal records
only love-robbed hearts
defined in blots of text.
4. Great poets escape,
beautifying the gutters
and long workdays
that shorten years,
the droll mouths, taste
of blackened lungs,
the thorns and teeth of night,
all in abstract metaphor
from a comfortable chair
facing a small garden.
By Jacob Ian DeCoursey
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