READ YOUR TEACHERS’ WORK

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 READ YOUR TEACHERS’ WORK

I was today-years-old

give or take a sleep or two

when I realized I should go back

and read my teachers’ work.

Volumes of their poetry float about my room,

cobwebs in the corners let alone for nearly a year now.

But how to get through the first one

whose heartbreak makes me so jealous

I could spit? Or the second whose luckless

lot has been spun so sharply the book burns 

my finger tips with every paging turn? 

Don’t get me started on the third

whose written every poem there is inside me.

Every single one, especially those

I am too afraid to write. No other poetry

is more pressing than that of my teachers,

but these old masters spare no sugar.

Every word and not word is salt.

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