Nobody Need Ever Know

Three minutes is the maximum amount of time

which will elapse between

a person discovering he’s talking to a poet

and said person exclaiming,

‘There’s a poem in that!’

I know this because I carry a stopwatch with me

at all times

and I’m overly fond of telling strangers –

usually in the sauna –

that I’m a poet.

It happened again today

(although this time it was in a steam room).

A delightful man

(note to self: stop judging people by their tattoos)

took a mere one minute

and twenty-seven seconds

to cheerfully intone the immortal words,

‘There’s a poem in that!’

My stock bland reply –

‘So there is!’ –

deserted me,

as I remembered a recent moment

of peevish misanthropy

when I had taken it upon myself

to be dismissively uncharitable

to the next person who uttered this

(to my ears) crass cliché.

Do painters get this?

How about composers?

‘There’s an opera in that!

There’s triptych in that!’

‘There’s a poem in everything,’

I replied, automatically, stupidly, meanly.

Genial, tattooed, bald, father-of-two,

recently retired, ballroom-dancing enthusiast,

(you can learn a lot about a person

in a short space of time

in a steam room/sauna),

looked momentarily taken aback, hurt,

as if I’d just said,

‘Oh, fuck off, will you?’

which is fair enough

because that’s what I had been thinking

and had been thinking

on pretty much every occasion I’d heard

‘There’s a poem in that!’

in recent years.

And I realised,

in my moment of meanness,

the enthusiasm with which the utterance

is usually exclaimed

could be the sign of a poetic awakening,

as if the person had never before realised

that such-and-such-a-thing –

could become a poem!

How exciting for them!

Maybe ‘There’s a poem in that!’

is their dormant, inner poet,

waking up from a lifetime of being ignored,

suddenly invigorated at seeing

the possibility of a poem in something

for the first time,

and they’re genuinely enthused.

Next time I’m told by an over-excited stranger,

within three minutes of hearing about my poetness,

‘There’s a poem in that!’

I won’t say,

‘Ah, so there is,’

and I certainly won’t say,

‘There’s a poem in everything,’ (there is),

but, ‘That’s your inner poet,

pleading with you to write a poem.

Why don’t you write it? Go on!

Nobody need ever know.’