The Poet that I am is not

Without a three-year contract,

an apartment in the 9th Arrondissement of Paris,

a pan for bacon,

or a little called Pauline

willed to me by Gertrude Stein,

I am not a book on the shelf

on the second floor of your library.

There is no music

without a paid subscription

so give the gift of existence

to melodies and alliterative rhythms

and poets, whenever possible.

Five hundred pounds a year

and a cottage in the Hebrides

could have kept Judith Shakespeare alive.

And for my part,

I have the numbers in black,

pretending to be money in digital bank accounts,

but all my arias were sacrificed

as litter paper for my Norwegian forest cat.

What I mean to say, quite simply,

is that this proper name

denoting “me,” displaying me,

will never be signed on title pages

on white-clothed rectangular tables of authority

in air-conditioned Barnes and Noble chain stores,

attacked and captured by the smell of French vanilla bean

dry roast and the sight of all the ones,

with their sweaters, ashtrays,

and leather-bound notebooks,

waiting to be me,

(who is, in fact, hypothetical)

scribbling a practiced pseudonym

on the beige and new and java-scented paper

of books.