Terminator Poet

It’s what I do.

It’s all I do,

redux to the fecund minimum.

Survival iffy, loved in vain,

but at least I know what love is for.

If anyone wanted me to continue 

I would have known by now.

Just waiting for a hamburger to grease the machine.

Creaky and leaky like an old jalopy 

they don’t make parts for anymore.

My program is to keep writing because a poem

might hit, strike a chord, a nerve, and never go away.

The world is crazy anyway.

Some may discover diamonds in art that saves

them from the world’s mediocrity, stimulates them

to find what they’re missing.

Stranger things have happened.

A parent’s admonition:

“Don’t grow up to be a poet, an artist, a dancer…

There’s little profit in it.”

…except for the beauty that arises from the soul,

if that can even be.

Food for thought or food for worms, either way

I’m doomed, but I knew that long ago.

I still write because all I can try to do is free the world

from its things, 

a Terminator poet with nothing to cling to except 

my program, my imaginings.