Friday, February 18, 2011

The first word is the hardest


Be a first word poet.

Compress the whole poem
into a tight little ball
along with your sketches
from memory,
a microphone chord,
a ukulele,
the Cats Eye Nebula,
and the clang of a free game 
of pinball.

Also your last letter home,
the Heart Sutra,
an awkward hand job,
Kansas at sun up,
buying a girl a shot of
Southern Comfort,
rusted batteries eating
through an old camera,
and the smell of Atlantic City,

squeeze all those things into
the first word of your poem
because it is infinite
and everything else is emptyness

2 comments:

Mac said...

Relatedly, the first cut is the deepest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zra0pjwlgEA

Peter Aaron Rogen said...

Hey mac, I heard your friend liz read this poem the other night on her Hippy Fiasco show. It was even better reading it, so as to absord it fully, you know, get all the rest of the emptiness after the first word.