How to Read a Poem (Hint:  Not With Your Eyes)


Touch

You cannot lift or load it, over your shoulder, throw it,
to best assay its weight - is it ponderous, full of big *** gravitas
or a snack, a parfait desert, a haiku delight?

You cannot touch it, but it can touch you,
It can grasp both your shoulders, shake you from complacency,
put its hands upon thy throat, gasp emit, a scream demanded,
paint whimsy lines on thy face, from ear to ear.

See

With yours eyes, by a mere glance, true reveal its length,
stanzas multiple or an itty bitty ditty, but this gives no value clue,  
Ogden Nash vs. Tennyson,
in two minutes make you laugh,
in twenty, make you beg, mercy!

Smell

Some Poe poems do stink, befouled mushrooms in
a dank place, some require nerve to read,
but your olfactory be ill suited for
poetic deconstruction and criticism.

Hear

Wake you with kisses upon thy face, inject love poems into thy ears,
straight to the brain verbal crack *******
yet even the hearing the whisper of words from my lips,
is an insufficient, sensorily speaking methodology,
of how a poem, to best comprehend

How then?

If touch, vision, smell and cursory hearing alone
can't essence capture, what then, weary reader,
is the supposed Laureate's approved analytical tool?

Taste

Each letter, a morsel in your mouth,
Each phrase, a fork full of pleasure,
Each stanza, a full fledged member in a tasting menu,
Perfect only in conjunction with the preceding flavor,
and the one that follows,  and the one that follows.

Taste each poem upon thy tongue and then pass it on,
you know how....

Each word, whether chewed thoroughly,
or lightly placed upon a bud for flavor,
needs the careful consideration of your mouth.

Feel the light pressure of the tongues tip upon the roof of your mouth
and the exalted exhalations of air rushing past thy cheeks
as you messenger breath from your chest to be shared with the world,
over the poem's interpreter, your tasting lips.

As I lay each word down, a brick by brick edifice construct
of mine own design, I am sated, fulfilled only,
when with I see your lips move as you savor my words,
my taste you share, and we are closer for it.

Deaf, dumb and blind, all such travails can be conquered, assailed,
but when I cannot, no longer anymore taste
my poems upon thy lips, then I breathe no more.