Swallowed

Some of my friends wonder how poetry comes so easy to me. I will share my secret with you, that is how I think. Now before you think I am boasting let me tell you that it sucks to think this way. Think about it, poetry is ambiguous, minimalistic, each word carrying many many connotations.

You cannot code with poetry, expecting the machine to somehow grasp what you are trying to say, neither can you write papers or communicate well by spouting seemingly random but related words. So I have to decode my thoughts into something other people can understand, you have probably seen me trying to do this before, and either succeeding or failing to different degrees.

Of course I am not the only one who has to decode their thoughts, many people have to do this, but what I am trying to say is that my poetry is me shutting down that structuring element in my mind and letting whatever seems to follow, out onto the keyboard or paper. That is why I write poetry when I am exhausted.

this next "poem" is not a good representation of what I mean though, this one is more of a narrative than my usual poems

Look at los viejas,
the old women, feeding the machines
with coin after coin,
hoping the steel will eventually
generously reciprocate in like fashion,
somewhere I heard that true insanity is doing
the same thing and expecting different results.
Humans feeding machines and vice versa
while the cigarette smoke creates a fog
that engulfs the casino floor,
slowly suffocating, but then everyone
is dying, just at different rates,
the viejas have seen their end,
the mafioso face theirs every day,
but the smiling dealers, the inviting dancers
the jovial bartenders, they feel it:
the smothering, slowly breathing up
the last of the oxygen until only
smoke, and dust are left.