Thanks, Garrison

You tell me
It's the birthday of Emily Dickinson
Victor Hugo Philip Larkin
Langston Hughes W.H. Auden
Dante

I'm all ears

And then you read a poem
By some guy named Bob
About drinking coffee in a kitchen
While frost dulls the windowpane
And a cat sleeps upstairs

A poem so twee
It's barely alive

Day after day
I wonder if some publisher
Whose books sell in the hundreds
Sends you cash
(or sacks of coffee)
To read this stuff

Day after day
I dream of Yeats
Pope
Coleridge
Pushkin
Basho

And I get Bob
The adjunct professor
With his kitchen table poem
And his cat

Maybe I'll see
What else
Is on
The radio