I forgot to start the time.
How do you say it?
Countdown?
So please, Tyler, signal me when it's 40 minutes ago.
Poetry manifesto.
Poems come in different kinds.
They may be tall or not really, women or not really.
Poems grow too.
But they do not need watered.
They are not trees.
And you are not water.
For a poem to grow, he or she needs to be cradled.
You may encounter a poem missing a leg or an arm.
But that's no need to be sad.
They can regrow them, like lizards who lose their tails
and find them again.
Some poems, though, never grow wings.
Or they grow them, then lose them.
Maybe their bodies lack calcium or something.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
First, the poem must be caught.
Poems, they scatter, play hide and seek, disguise themselves
as prose, and all of that.
It is therefore best to use a net.
They themselves will only cling onto you
if you are running or driving somewhere.
They will settle with the wind on hair,
on cheeks, will rest there as if on a windscreen.
Then you can simply go ahead and write them down.
Capture when stationary is more difficult.
For this, a bait is required.
Predatory poems will appreciate a drop of blood.
For the more sweet toothed, a thin stream of honey
will do, falling from the spoon back into the jar.
And then their corpses, if enough have been gathered
and there isn't space to store them,
can be nailed to paper pages published as a book.
And thus, you will have your own cemetery.
There are, however, further approaches
and more thorough classifications according
to which poems are people.
Overly close contact may result in orgasmic or schizophrenic
states.
It's a very old poem.