KIM TAPLIN

MAYBE IT IS SOME USE

I was put in mind of a class I had once
of Long-term Unemployed

they were all men and what's more men
whom life had given a pasting
& some were depressed
& some were searching
for someone (like me?) to blame

they hadn't chosen Poetry
but someone had thought it might fill up
the number of classes they needed to get
some kind of credit the powers that be
had told them they needed to get

I asked what they thought that Poetry was:
"Bad Grammar" rapped back the one in a suit
(they said he'd run his own company once)
while an old hippy with his hair in a bunch
told us "Geysers from the Unconscious"(outasight!)
adding he'd once met Ginsberg, long ago

the guy in the suit wrote a moving piece
about having to shoot his injured dog
when he was a trainer, when he was in the army
and later brought us a photo of him -
his was the piece that I remember best

but the reason I thought of them was the other day
the computer suddenly put out a virus alert
& when I clicked to see what had got it excited
the answer was "Suspicious White Space " -
someone had mailed an open field poem
and it didn't like the look of it at all

I liked it a lot, & thought those three words
were a poem in themselves —
if given plenty of space of course
and a line or two apiece

or maybe it could at least be the working title
for a book of poems someone needs to write