Home On It

So much appears
Unfit for poetry. To rage about

The insular, to croon about
the moon. Romances

of the narrow mind, instead
of studies of serious bedrock

or adventures on a
sea. At school the rule is always

getting hackneyed, an inevitable skit
laugh-tracked with advertising jokes; the heart

cannot go out, consigned to our
accessoried electives. Nor can mind.

Let's set the lot of them adrift, kick
kids across an ocean at sixteen,

to work at wonder, somewhere, well
before they're fully glazed, committed

to positions moralist or borrowist or authorized
by fashion. Let's let them fly, or float, or

fathom anything, and in the process
find themselves immersed. Not fretting

over first, or fast, or