he asked me what my favourite poem was
and I said I couldn't pick just one,
but that I really liked The Waste Land,
and he said "why, when no one really
understands it?" and I told him,
"that's what I like about it",
and it's because in all of its chaos
it makes so much more sense
than a sonnet, than anything
from Spenser or Shakespeare,
it makes sense because the only way
to write life is to stuff 400 lines
full of subtext and allusions
until your head is spinning.
I told him that Eliot created
a waste land with letters
and maybe that's the only way
to write anything,
and he nodded as if he agreed
or at least understood
but said that he preferred Yeats
to Eliot and Neruda to Yeats
because life was enough
of a mess without the modernists.