Artwork by Elisa Insua
Marketing
There’s a poet
from my country
Do you know him?
Of course you do.
Everyone knows him
And for good reason.
He gave us the line
“All I want is boundless love.”
There’s another poet,
Me, who
No one knows
And for no reason.
Or maybe the reason is
Marketing.
You’ve gotta put yourself
out there, they say.
Get in front of where
eyeballs search.
Do they have awareness
Of you?
Of this poetry
What’s your Call-to-Action?
What metric could measure
this campaign? What strategy?
If I hashtag Frank O’Hara
Is that a celebrity endorsement?
If you, too, want boundless
love maybe you’ll give me
the million and first heart
his immortal life earned us all.
But I don’t do it
Because I don’t want it.
(That symbol
turned
common and meaningless
though daily scores of
Tap tap, tap tap...)
It’s your real heart I want
Beat beat beating
with my song inside.
Everything is quantifiable
they say. I say,
that sum
of divided attention
tossed fast out the glass window
in the palm of your hand
has no value to me
for this reason:
All my poems
are love
poems that make no sense
because love makes us
no sense
and also
Love is
the only sense there is.
So really this poem is about
Truth and God
knows there’s no
market for that.
Infinity is not a number;
Love is not quantifiable.
But I do wonder
If tag you on Instagram
Would you repost me?