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I had to unlearn what I was taught to know poetry.
For me it was my Nan taking down the nets after Grandad died
show, don’t tell the readers what happened to tale heavy eyes of a widow,
show, don’t tell those who look in to what they see are just keyholes of worlds.
School nights for me were moons that dropped like aspirins into a big grey drink,
factory men used to look at me like kin they must seen a poet in me,
they must have seen the malfunctioning child becoming stuck.
They showed without telling me that they were poems.
Classroom 4B, 1984 and a teacher chewing an onion and a poem by Phillip Larkin.
He told us all what Toads were and we jumped to where he told us.
He told without showing us that Larkin was a man of metaphor
that day I remember Ian Chapman fell asleep on blank paper.
Classroom 1F, 1985, and I was told not shown that Robert Frost was a genius.
I felt the snowy wood of my blood capillaries when my Nan disappeared,
she would stare across the Rothmans fog lost, and picture him reading .
She showed me that love is a sect of two people in average rapture,
milling skin to make life that will ultimately pale to city grey.
This is how schools ruined poetry for everyone.
This is how I was shown literal metaphor,
its always a woman with the blood-keys
opening the way, the road of one.