John Pierce is a high school teacher in Central Texas. Recently, his work has appeared in Defenestration, Feathertale, Rubber Lemon, and The Shinnery Review.

Two Poems (March 20, 2011. Issue 26. The SLAM & FLASH Issue!)

Poetry Soup

You remember, as a kid,
how alphabet soup was sometimes fun,
how, on occasion, a revelation,
of a modest scale, might appear
right before your eyes.
Never quite cosmos out of chaos, exactly,
but something cute,
like “a-s-s.” Something to make
you forget, for the moment,
that all that swirling mash
of soggy letters and scrambled words,
mostly tasted like shit.

The Warriors

I once thought that poets were bold.
You know, wielding pens like Star Wars swords
(just mightier, so they say),
alive with the Force and ready to use it.
Teeming warrior priests, misguiding toward life
by trick of Words which could name
and bear and conquer even death (sometimes).

But then I got to school, opened the book,
and read the poem: A ponderance
on crippled Hephaestus
pining for his wife, a lament
on the ongoing absence
of Anteros’s blessing…

And another
on writing poetry
about poetry
or something.

And that’s when I felt
what the cynics hope--
that the poets have been tamed.
They are warriors still,
but of the sort
content to have traded
pens for swords.