American Poetry
Europe;
where our cities
were thrown up
out of towns
come together
and clustered
around roads
which pooled up naturally
like ponds, chaos
on a cockroach pile
and buildings
beautiful
as old apple trees —
of course
we would create
metrical poetry,
starving for structure
and staved against the chaos.
America
came later
so towns got built
of course
by managers
who were all
so bloody minded
sensible about things — if you are
going
to build a town, they said,
why not build it in a straight line
god fuck it? — and so
their towns
go up and down
at right sharp
angles, straight north/south cities
without even the grace of those old stonehenge things
where the light could catch
a certain street
on a certain day
and play with it.
of course
then
American poetry
would come out,
free
verse
and they’d export it
as they do everything.
no abab
but ahab;
puns,
patchwork
and stabbing themselves in the fingers.
no discipline here,
no meter —
hell
you can get all
that downtown.
I’m in Ireland now
and Dublin rubs
like a crumpled
paper
so I should really
be going metrical
but I like free verse,
so I do it and damn the lot of them
just
like an American would —
I should have been born an American;
though if I was real artist
of any side
the Europe section
of this poem
would be
metric
and the American
free verse. and if I was
a clever artist
maybe
it’d be the other way around.
I’m neither though. just a dumb
Irishman
who thinks writing a line
with a fiddly
fucking metaphor
and no capital letters
is enough.
and look at that
sometimes
it is.