Jim's Poetry Emporium

Jim Larwill

Canadian Shield Chapbooks I.
Text Box: This morning I am late for work -- 9:52 a poet who would like to keep regular hours, would like to run a little poetry shop, where customers could come off the street to buy their daily dose of verse. I would spend my days sitting behind a polished maple counter making adjustments to rhyme, correcting a sprung rhythm or two, I would spend my days bringing meaning to sentence fragments, ones I found in the morning hanging in plastic bags tied to the brass handle of my Poetry Emporium's door. And when the small silver bell rankled across the top of the opening door I would jump up to meet smiling faces of the regulars, who had become more than patrons, were almost friends, even if some of them were also assholes. Text Box: We would exchange greetings; would talk of the weather; latest oppressive government; would remember a time that never was, but is still, to this very day, part of all our memories. "What will it be today?" but my customers wouldn't even have to say for I would see it in their eyes and I would go to the shelf behind the counter, would pull just the right poem from one of the cubby holes that covered the wall. I would never let them read the product in the shop, although there would be times when I would recite one or two; but these would not be for sale, I would not wrap these oral works in brown paper, I would not tie them up in neat packages and hand them over to anxious hands across a counter, Text Box: Yet poetry is not a business and capitalism has little use for verse, unless it is selling a lie, and here I sit, not in a public shop, but in a private attic room my life as a writer little more than a cliché I act out at poorly attended readings and in the dark hidden corners of dimly-lit taverns where I wait for self-addressed rejection slips, from little magazines, with big editorial policies, ones nobody ever really reads. So let me describe this morning act of poetry not as I would want it not as a pleasant lie but as the very real hell within, one which promises redemption from a blasphemous self, the act of poetry that is a prayer to a God I have long ago willed into non-existence, Text Box: . an act of poetry in which every word is a prayer and a curse, an act of poetry which can only be described as a form of faith that has lost all meaning in this time and this space. Dear God Dear God of the futile and ridiculous I write, and I speak, these words for you, and for you alone. Text Box: even if the bow of soft white string fluttered like butterfly wings in the breeze that came in off the busy street, these poems would be my trademark; and like any advertising would be property of all potential customers. And sometimes when the customer was a woman; one who had forgotten how lovely she really was, or had never been told, I would bend down behind the counter and from a secret place would pull the poem; I had been - for all these years - saving just for her - and had just now - this very moment - built up the courage to give; whispering this into her ear as I slipped it into the package with the other poems, telling her to read it when she was alone: and to never let her husband; or her father; or her children; or even let her secret lover read it; Text Box: because this poem was written for her, and for her alone, and to let anyone else read it, even the woman next door, it would destroy the power of this special poem, which could, and would, bring magic into her life. I would make her promise not to show it to anyone and there would be no charge. It would be especially important she not show it to the woman next door, for the woman next door may have just been given the very same poem under exactly similar conditions earlier that morning. Of course, there are those who would say this is a corrupt practice; but the poem was free and any accusation of corruption shows a lack of knowledge concerning the size of "universal truths" and betrays a lack of understanding of the mercantile nature of poetry.