'Reading poetry on facebook' by Rae Desmond Jones

reading poetry on facebook
is like wearing a condom on my eyeballs–

something slippery & nylon
between the cornea & the lens,

so it’s my eyes
that are the problem 
& the brain that squats behind them

plus the 65 years of reading 
they’ve done mostly
on paper

but it wasn’t always on paper -

Homer was this blind old fart
who wandered about 
singing & banging 
a garbage tin lid

& if he was cooling it
with a few bottles of vino
on Mount Olympus with his mates

what would he have made 
of Wordsworth & Coleridge – 
where’s the blood in them …

so I look across at my old yellow
Waste Land & I want to crawl
in between its Faber cardboard

all fusty & dusty & modernist
but it’s with Allen Ginsberg now
the shakiest brains of our generation

are not destroyed by madness or
marijuana or sodomy –

all it takes, my dear, is time
& that glow leaking through a screen.



posted with permission of Rae Desmond Jones