ON WRITING ONE MORE RECOMMENDATION LETTER FOR YET ANOTHER FRIEND’S APPLICATION FOR A LAUREATESHIP

1.
In residential districts, the laurel is grown high

and trimmed to a dense hedge delineating

this-is-mine, while insisting

the-street-must-not-see-

 what-I-have: the laurel celebrates a separation

from one’s fellow citizens.
And these flimsiest of laurels you seek

are surely a dim shadow of celebrity:

the worship of vacuous shape-shifters, human beings

manipulated, Photoshopped by paid liars

into products that sell other products. In your case,

less a means to enrich the owners

of this deceit, and more a state-approved oddity

like a pet iguana on a leash, or a neutered or spayed wolverine

that will fetch and carry on command.

Yet what do these laurels sell?
                            Are your words to be

the stamp of authentication

on the forms everyone is asked to fill in

to justify the arrangements

whereby cash is continually siphoned to the wealthy?

Would you add toy-store magic dust

to these schemes, or sing for a few pitiful coins

of the necessity–or irrelevance–of the expanding desert

between the compensation package of senior executives

and the crowded buses daily hauling their cargo

to the prisons of hopeless diversions and dreams?
2.
Let us abjure authority’s laurel

       and with bill cap and hardhat firmly in place
proclaim: we build this world as slaves

       scourged by want and need
by the overseers of money. Nevertheless

       we build for all, and for a day
when everyone, everyone

       are poets, after their own fashion,
so that when at last we can remove our headgear

       in homage to our neighbors,
what nestles in our hair

       will be their subtle, magnificent,
cranky and hilarious words, telling

       of everything their shoes have encountered,
words as material as leaves of cedar or birch,

       or laurel,
words that wreathe us in the distinction

       of a rich equality: of friends,
companions, cousins

       –an interlaced
and enduring

       solidarity.

~ Tom Wayman

Bio: Dirty Snow is Tom Wayman’s eighteenth collection of poems. He has edited a number of anthologies, including The Dominion of Love (2001). His published fiction includes two books of short stories and the novel Woodstock Rising (2009).

To read more poems by Tom Wayman, click here.