Old Souls
Poets are all born old
Babies with old souls
Their best and deepest stuff
Slumbers unsaid, unwritten.
Everything that follows literacy
Is second rate and derivative
Compared to the trove of desperate wails
They carry around from infancy.
Some poets just get older and older
They run out of money and insurance benefits
Everyone they love dies.
All they write are elegies
Other poets age in reverse
The world increasingly becomes
More and more wondrous
Entire poems of only punctuation marks
And then, finally, the magnum opus
Delivered just before they’re born—
A baby’s first laugh.
8/19/25
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