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This will be the smallest, most insignificant, most trivial,
And most forgettable poetic parable anyone has ever written
Because for once I’ve been wrung of all my deep evocations
I’ve been whittled of my angular description of the commonplace
Of verbose, grandiose trajectories mapped out
By minds I will never exist alongside but I will sure emulate

I have sat down and asked myself, innumerable times,
“Okay, so how will I describe the sunrise now?”
And more importantly, perhaps more existentially:
“What about the sunset?”
What colors haven’t I used, what other comparable thing
Haven’t I eluded those colors to,
And what kind of uncharted, beautiful, spiritually-boggling human emotion
Hasn’t been tapped by this setting star until right now,
Right as I string together letters like they’ve
Never been strung before?

There’s the endless wellspring of my poetic—
Oh, look, there I go, visualizing thoughts and feelings
As a mystical, water-associated apparatus
(It’s my go-to)
For a time more innumerable than the sunrise.

I’m getting tired of it,
And I can’t imagine how mind-blowingly dull it must be for you
So I’m going to try it like this:
I see the sunset again, and tonight it’s very pretty.

But, poet, this kind of routine, boring description
Doesn’t do much for me.
I know what a sunset is, I’ve seen it
My three year old can probably
Get a pretty accurate crayon drawing penned out in a few seconds
And that will hardly distinguish itself from
What you’ve made the sunset out to be

But, poet, from all across the world, from their unique angles
All the aspiring poets gaze toward the same sun,
Whether in setting, whether rising, or hung there in the sky
And describe it as a tantalizing metaphor

And then relate that sun
To a deep, embedding, defining emotion or craving for human connection
As if to say,
Yes
I see the sun that way too
I feel that way too

And then those poets submit their poems to publishing
And watch the sunset as any normal person would
Once they’re out of the mode.
In fact, what’s on television? / Shut the blinds, Dylan,
There’s a glare on the screen.

“Okay”

This poem hasn’t brought itself out there, out to you
As a grand accomplishment of absolute detachment
As a way to try to break the barrier of poetry once again,
To define itself as a new genre, or an edgy statement the author
Very desperately intends his audience ‘gets’
Or even to prove an angle nobody has ever seen or attempted before
Because how I am supposed to know how you think?
Or what you see, and how you see it?

This poem is a message of the ordinary,
That it’s okay, it’s absolutely fine, to remove the mysticism from the mundane
And understand the world as a beauty in itself,
One that doesn’t need the aloof, grand, mystical verbosity of poetry
To be felt as something poetic

In fact, I won’t even leave you to ponder the greater meaning of it,
Of this line, or that line. I will say it here,
At the end, at the climactic and awesome point of emotional delivery
That all poetry intends:
I see the sunset again, and tonight it’s very pretty.



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