by Greg Baysans
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Mercury
Sex is the closest activity I know to writing poetry -- spontaneous and familiar at the same time, or cooking maybe. A recipe then: tonight I'll add a little chicory, a little chicanery, a little cannery covered with cold rain and chicken shit. I'm tired and can't get onto that bunk bed tonight but want to get there because that may be where there's a bridge to the plateau I'm looking for, not this new-found one I enjoy some but, as I said, am tired of. Blue body builders are not company nor imagined visits to Braque galleries with Scissor Sisters and Vonneguts enough. No. It's baseball that's the best metaphor for poetry. A long season, most games are barely memorable, but once in a while the game's a gem -- say a no hitter. Is the poet the baseball season or the relief pitcher warming up in the sixth inning for an appearance in the eighth? Or is he the batter trying for a home run? Even in an ordinary game, every move counts, the moment as it happens, suspense, spontaneous familiarity where anything can happen next. I could start again. I could erase the above and start again. Or I could repeat the start again but not erase it all and start again or I could strike out looking.
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"Mercury" appeared in Oct. 2007 Tipton Review of Poetry