Jack Grapes is an award-winning poet, playwright, actor, teacher, and the editor and publisher of the long-running ONTHEBUS, one of the top literary journals in the country. This poem is from Jack Grapes’s new book, The Naked Eye.

*****

Here’s a Poem

 

Here’s a poem that has not

been revised or rewritten

or read aloud or cut

or extended or given to a lover.

Here’s a poem that

has no code word, no

name for something else,

no intended meaning,

no axe to grind.

Here’s a poem inconsequential

as a thumbtack.

Give me a penny for it

and you’ve overpaid.

Lose it and it’s still there

for all it was worth.

Here’s a poem less than

twenty lines.

Defend it.

What are you looking for?