Another Boring Academic Poem

by Michael Hoerman



I stop reading the poem.

I'm tired of reading poems about the atmosphere in the car
when one middle-aged professor confesses to an affair,
and the other says "I expect a divorce," not divulging
her own.

(I stop reading the poem)

I don't care to hear of telephones, aching
insatiably with the yearning of those trapped in ivory towers
of splendid isolation, haunted by a memory,
caught, in a downpour, kissing a new lover...

(I stop reading the poem)

or of the sleepless nights vacillating in this highbrow soap-opera,
imbued with vast realms of subtext through the lilting recitation
of poems written in this narcissistic trance.

I stop reading those poems because

I prefer cruder poems
such as this one, recalling the musky smell of her loins and taste
of her kiss, knowing she was with a woman the night before,
illuminated by the same candles, which flicker gently in the same breeze,
through the same open windows, rousing the same sheer curtains,
as we grind on the same sheets, each breathing the pheromones of another,
wondering why our bed burns so hot this night.








©2002 by Michael Hoerman


Michael Hoerman's poetry has appeared in The Rockhurst Review, WordWrights, The Heartlands Today, Prison Life Magazine, Freshwater 2002, and Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, with poems forthcoming in Off the Cuffs (Soft Skull Press) and Mischief, Caprice and Other Poetic Strategies (Red Hen Press). His favorite poets are autodidacts.


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