it’s been a long time
since i’ve drawn or painted anything,
and sure i’d like to pick up a paintbrush again,
even though i’m also certain what i would
have to paint wouldn’t be technically sound,
nor all that disciplined,
but i’d have acrylic under my nails once again,
and i might feel as if i made something,
even though i probably should have strangled it
before it got loose
as someone that considers themselves a poet,
i sometimes ask whether the world needs
any of my poems,
to which i suppose need is too strong of a word,
considering how much poetry existed before i was
ever conceived by minds and hands of masters
long deceased and overcrowded in the streets of cemeteries,
but then i also have to ask what i would do with my time
if i didn’t spend it writing random poems and stories,
and more than likely i would be scrolling through reddit,
or playing chess or xbox,
or maybe reading a book by or about some dead person,
or, at least at this particular moment while i write this,
i would be roasting coffee for some stranger on the internet,
all of which i do, i swear,
but sometimes i write poems in between these random assortment
of activities because…
i can, because…i like to,
despite knowing that the world would go on,
people would go on,
with or without my limited contribution of poems assembled
haphazardly on the internet,
curated by myself for a few fellow lonely
cybertravelers wondering and wandering,
spinning happily in arbitrary directions,
in one quick breath caught by the vulture’s wing,
and then gone…
keith haring explanations lit up
by sodium fluorescence tangled in a web
on the side of the road,
with passer-bys and lookie-loos
barely paying an iota of attention
to the culture laid before them,
the streets bleeding from beneath
Fred Aiken Writing 