“A Booster, I Hope” [by Stanley Moss]

Stanley Moss

A Booster, I Hope

There’s a teacher of poetry

who teaches her own verse

Snakes Breasts and Nothings to a class

who must buy her book at full price

       if they want to learn from her

how to make a poem.

Who was the authority

who gave her the authority

to pull out students’ eyes

her twenty Gloucesters.

I had nine years. I was fortunate

I cruised the Mediterranean then

crossed the United States in a Chevy.

In yesterday years I remember

      watching chain gangs suffering

in San Antonio I saw Mexico

from a dentist’s chair.

How many oil wells and windmills

did I pass I would battle later.

I thought the Petrified Forest was a holy place.

I wanted to go down on a donkey

to the river that made Grand Canyon.

Father was against it. I have to say

I thought fate was flat tires galore

until we drove through Death Valley.

I felt, heard the first inkling

        not yet a hint of fate and death.

When I was thirteen a fresh boy

I took a class in Shakespeare forever.

A little further along

the Cervantes Bach Mozart highway

I regret Greek was Greek to me.

I loved read and listened to Lorca

Rimbaud    Yeats    Auden and jazz

I crashed a party of international

poets and heroes

      who spoke for their nations.

They gave their words to the world

they could have sold

for shekels pounds or nutmeg.

I swam in the deep pond of Thoreau

with African American poets and others.

I was pretty good at the Malcom X kick. 

I am afraid when I utter a word

I give a poetry lesson:

talk like me or don’t talk like me.

There’s a virus of lies

that guns down liberty

going around the world.

Please get your booster.

These words are a mask.

Why do I say there’s a dictionary of clouds?

       

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Author: The Best American Poetry