The weight of things

What we wear upon our skin

comes down to how we

hold ourselves in light against

the grief, the bullshit

-the photos we carry within

are what we use

-hope against routine

the old poets are dying

today I read a poem about

Philip Levine by a writer

on Prose.

who goes

by the handle of

justinbarisich

and it took me back

to the days when the poets fed me

clean blood

before I became old and closed off

before I tired of the complaints

of the ages

and burned alive and dead so many

of my heroes because I began to sense

falsity in them

but the truth is and always was

what I know now

time only gives a sentence so many

ways

regardless of how we do it

I think back on this and I feel

somewhat bad for walking away

from them

when I should have realized that

I was one of them

even though I didn't want to be in

that club, I was born in it

not to spin this around on myself

but the weight of things for me

comes down to the word against

the page of the world, the old world

the new world, the world we will leave

and the world they will leave

it all burns in a circle

it always has

-a factory in Detroit harboring

steel poetry

-Bukowski's widow laughing to me that

their house will probably be a museum

-the sorrowful exit of Vonnegut against marble

-Hamsun's shamed picture next to Hitler

and all the deaths that carried the weight of beauty

into the ground to be buried and remembered only

by the readers they touched, and to be less and less

mentioned by those of us who have the reach to

remember them in poetry, in stories

all while containing and preserving our own

precious voices and self-respect

our own bullshit

that some other

fucker pushing 30 or 40

will start start detecting falsity in

and less of them than us today

will record them in poems

while those of us remaining

will constantly reach for the

resonance of Whitman

and other timeless entities

to ring through space after our deaths

but we will also forget this

during the course of things

and regardless of

whatever this is

we are only fed

by the hot blood

of artists.