Walk Right In, Sit Right Down

I was thinking how it would be kind of cool to be a political consultant. There is an obvious need for one or two with a little common sense. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized I might be good at it, but I wouldn't enjoy it. It's not my calling. I'd much rather be a poetry consultant. Now anyone who knows me or has read anything I've written knows I am not a poet, but that's all right. As a political consultant is not a politician, so a poetry consultant is anything but a poet. I'm not a musician either but I can tell you what sounds good to me. While in the world we have a plethora of the political, there is not nearly enough poetry. Perhaps there never has been, but there seems a particular dearth these days.

I'd like to set up a walk-in poetry clinic, open 24 hours a day. If you are a practicing poet we'll fix you up on a monthly pre-pay plan with poetry insurance, so you just walk in, pay a nominal fee and get full service. We'll be a general practice clinic, fixing broken meters and taking care of geriatric metaphors, sick similes and sprained rhymes. If you need meaning, we'll have to send you to a specialist.

As best I can tell, having 45 million mostly healthy people without health insurance is much less of a problem than having two or three times that number who don't know Jack Kerouac from Jack Sprat, Robert Penn Warren from Robert Louis Stevenson, or Sylvia Plath from Sylvia's Mother. Perhaps if our coins and folding money featured pictures of Poe, Longfellow, Whitman, Frost and Eliot, we would take more notice of the poetic. As it is we are seriously and satirically anemic, getting all our poetic nourishment from popular music, which is like living on Pop Tarts.