Poetry, unNetflix me

By guest poet Jessica Perini

The Buddha says
the source of all
suffering is
Reaching.

But isn’t that what poetry is?
Reaching
grasping
beyond
to that place where meaning sits?

If that is suffering,
perhaps it is good.

Where are you, poetry?

Years ago
you walked out,
disgusted.
I had exhausted your
cliches,
your midnight skies
and stars falling.
Your ocean waves and fingered waves lapping the shore.
You stormed out
fusing a door shut on me

I don’t blame you.
I should have
kicked that door down.
But
the chemicals …
the chemicals …
Ah yes, the chemicals
blurred my frenzied mind –
which until then
had blazed in a million trillion directions
from the gutter,
Reaching
toward
the yawning beyond.

Were they any good?
Now, I see them as
cheap
flipped word
tricks

Poetry
You
abandoned me.
Calm
middle class
Netflix-bedazzled
hollow
of a dancing dirge.

Happy
in my chemical
poetic Blankness
I’ve sat in
the couch of my mind
so steady
so ok
so blissfully nowhere,
searching for nothing.
A Buddha-be-blessed
state.

Do I wish for the suffering again?
No.

But I do miss you, poetry.
I miss the slide of an unsteady
gait,
of stanzas blooming
from seemingly untapped depths.
I miss being
nowhere
then discovering
somewhere:
an idyl path
untrod
suddenly so
Present,
as if it always were.

Forgive me?