I got lost in a poetry workshop

In a poetry workshop that I was not in, the instructor found a poem, in a rather serendipitous way.

It had been abandoned, like a muted dummy, behind glass windows with the occasional blaring lights and still nobody noticed it, nothing needed repeating so it hid without an echo in the Xerox, a sterile x-ray cloning machine, like perverted a fly on the wall, imagine all the things it has seen-purely x-ray-ted poemography.

The instructor said she tried diligently to find its composer. It didn't have an ID tag. It was an unregistered homeless poem uncounted. Like a stray cat, as independent as a poem or cat may be, it positioned itself to be heard, and cats don't meow just for themselves. And birds like their own songs.

The instructor did not use a paper poster with her phone number notched in strips fringed at the bottom of the page, she asked around, looking for its negligent owner.

Nobody called the unknown number, nobody claimed the paper.

Nobody at the workshop recognized the dummy because its features were so vague, it could be any of us, like the lucid moment(s) of writing a poem and the details arrive, it's right there, our likeness.

This abandoned poem could easily have hid in the trash instead, accompanied by overflowing evidence of wasted resources, spent but not gone.

The instructor credits old Anonymous, and recites it for the thousands in, but not at this poetry workshop.  All ears, just a washing machine of words and ideas whirled in from the wobbly weird world of poetry, have you seen some of those people? I don't look, but I'm all ears.

And amid the chaos and anonymity this voice, its thoughts, noticing, go on and on and on, and when you are not listening you are hearing, you are there, seeing it, you are in it. It was not her voice, her reading, it was the weight of the words on the page.

It may have not been special, but it was a wonderful wonder how it all worked. Simply, eloquently and delicately weaving into ones reality, a choice, of another voice, that sees the same thing.

Causeless, waiting to be found, it's speech not wanting to interrupt, polite and ready to multiply, resonate, refract, project, distribute, share its dislocated effect at any time. It stopped me. Grabbed, arrested and invested in me so humbly.

Which made me realize, or recognize really, that the most powerful poetry, the best poetry, has oft been abandoned, rejected, neglected-abused by is creator-who must let it go- literally must let it go-in every way…

Because there is no poet, there is only poetry-waiting to be heard. Yes, by other poets in a poetry workshop that were never even there, but who also cherished every poetic word, louder than it could have ever hoped to have been heard, as an anonymous dummy quietly hiding in the copy machine.

Image by William Blake [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons, A Little Girl Lost Plate 44.