Never Explain Your Poem

I am telling you never to explain your poem while I am preparing to explain mine. In the poem below, the quaint image of the mail process used by poets in the pre--internet Stone Age to submit poems via snail mail (and still practiced by a few voodoo doctors or superannuated atavists) focuses upon the importance of the placement of the poem in the faith of the envelope, which vessel is then placed in the faith of the mail ("dark water") to reach an "editor of loneliness" (I, too, cringe) who then pounds a nail into the hull of the (poem? envelope? both?) before returning the poem/boat sinking to the ship maker poet. Maybe the important thing for the ship maker is not the return of the boat but the congress with the sea. It is a perverse thought, but sailors and ship makers usually are perverse. You can find them in the most unusual beds. The faith of putting the poem in an envelope is a physical faith. The tongue participates, licks the body of the envelope in a poor man's Eucharist (moistening with a sponge is for the insincere) and this is like the faith present in every moment in which one licks one's beloved (or near-beloved). Like a cat. I can remember the intimacy of these moments in my youth, the church of this boring rite. I mean the licking of envelopes, not the licking of lovers, which wasn't so boring. I think why the words emerged thusly in that poem is this idea that the boat is not complete without the envelope, the social envelope of the poem. The social envelope is meant to be torn to bits whether the poem's "ship-setting ritual" is successful or not. Its protective body will be torn like Bacchus in an act of violence which will turn out to be, nevertheless, very disappointing should this act be too carefully or closely compared with that revelry of ancient, mythological destruction. But the metaphor suggests a kernel of divinity. Bacchus's body may be torn to bits. But Bacchus may not be torn to bits. Maybe the Bacchantes got off on this fact. The ship is torn to pieces and either the poem sails back or the laurel leaves of an acceptance (is there not secretly then a grieving by the poet for the child stolen as if by fairies and, possibly, actually by fairies?) The returning (rejected) poem is like the prodigal son. It might be hated and spurned by its maker. It might by stomped in front of its more comely and promising siblings. It might be embraced for itself, the spiritual fact of itself, or for its growth potential. It depends on the degree of enlightenment of its maker. Perhaps the returned poems should be our great loves. They stayed loyal to their maker. Only he or she could love them. The poem that was published would rather lose its maker. It dances on the sea with its show-off sails. But those are copies, reflections, fame ghosts. The real poem, published or not, languishes in a drawer or on an electronic device somewhere. The one the maker's hands touched. It will doubtless be destroyed and no one will be there to console it. It seems a lonely business all the way around. The only solution, apparently, illogically, is for the ship maker to be buried with his or her ship. Or burned with it.  Probably Vikings did this, sincerely. Authentically. But we are traitors when compared to the Vikings. We might not drive as many spikes into as many heads as they did, but we know something is missing. All those little shining beads of character woven into that long, gnarly hair. We smolder with envy. But we have attempted to recapture this with the resurgence in Viking beards lately, a fad which I note is now nearly over. We have no sticking power for the feral things we desire most. We are pagans manqués. We know inside that Vikings were never slumming it, and one glance at the contemporary scene lets us know that we are only too happen to fall into that modus vivendi.  Let us for once be glaringly truthful and admit that most forms of social media are couches and that most occupants of those social media couches are couch louts.