An American River

Have I the patience for other people's poems?

I began a poem with a hammer. I said its name in Portuguese. I admitted that nobody cared about poetry hammers in any language.

It was one single block of steel prose poem dropping from ceiling to floor -- text shaped exactly like a New York skyscraper, and you're damned right it invoked Ginsberg. I'm the somebody in this poem! The invisible somebody in this poem set against the metalic distance of American life.

It referenced me as the invisible hero in the poem. A sort of mechanical narrator in the background of American life, an undiscovered Whitman wannabe in American life.

I was the one who showed up, impatiently, with the weight of a longing far too large to carry.  I took up the weight of a hammer.

I was the one who turned to other people's poems with a hammer, a hammer with which to make their poetry mine. 

I was the miner in that poem.  It was a mining hammer.  I smashed the ore of their poems in hasty search for gold. 

It is not for attention or praise that I run around smashing, smashing.... I can't stand the heat of the furnace, the slow, long, hard work which is really mine to do. Mine, because not mine. Mining because not mining. Ours because of Whitman. We. Us. And the sad loss of it all. The fear of failure. And just as much, the fear of success.

The Sisyphean effort of it all! The pain of burning in the smelter. The fear of failure, of success. The longing alchemy. The sight of my own corpse. The image of an American river, green and lush. The shimmering springhead, the raven, the osprey. Those leaves of grass.