Reading and Writing
I am writing.
You are reading.
He, she and the infinite its are
caught in their own dispute of being
and are not here yet.
They we look down upon with disdain.
We are intimate.
Although between the two actions
(I having been writing, you still, presumably, reading)
there is time and space,
the verb carries sense between mind and pen,
my page and your eyes.
Aside from subjects of romance, possibly the most popular theme of poetry is poetry itself, the art and artifice of the form, in which the poem often tries to carve out a special place for itself in the consciousness of the reader and to assert itself as the most special experience to be found in culture. These are grandiose claims, and in the poem above, I tried to modify and qualify them by stripping the act of poetry down to its essential quality as a communication that may, or may not, make itself heard.
