Intervention Poetry

 Intervening Poetry

by john clare

Can you take my life and make it a poem? he said,

lately everything has taken on new meaning

and I would rather you make sense of it instead

of a higher power coming down and intervening.

So I took a close look into his life and found

the reason why things were void of rhyme.

I took the quill and parchment to write it down,

trying not to be too vague or sublime.

It took several revisions before I was pleased

and presented it to him with nervous anticipation,

hoping his life now a poem would allow him to see

and appreciate the finer insights of inspiration.

It wasn't long before I received a call

and it was my friend all in a terrible confusion

that it wasn't what he expected at all

Where did you get the words you were using?

Such are the traps we enter when our friends

ask the poets to compose lines upon their lives

and the barbs stick and the bleeding begins

as if my pen was meant as a daggered knife.

So I took the eraser and began anew the lines

and wrote a simple nursery rhyme easy to

understand and certain not to offend this time,

but as a poet of lives I was through.

And on the wall framed for all to see

is the poem composed with mixed intention.

Each time it is read I cringe greatly

for you see, he really needed that intervention.