Paperback Pirates

But who does the poet publish?
After we bare tits and whips
         and hopes and wits
with a patch where the eye's supposed to sit
but blindly watching the back of a blank deposit?
Bearing witness, dropping flesh
and getting called out on what's left?
What's left is what you mimic
as you flew off my shoulder like a parrot
         *cracker cracker*
without a perch to cry on
but that's the plank you're willing to die on.
Not puzzling wizardry.
Not a science. An industry
         lacking chemistry,
biology, marine; ministry of sinister
leaves of absences
         and an
absence of leave.
Skip the skullduggery and handpatch the thuggery.
We sit alone on tiny islands selling ourselves our misery.
No one else knows what to buy
but not for our lack of trying.
We're not silent but being self-reliant
sucks mercy from our content just to pay rent
on a glossy shell and slick font.
$14.95 on Amazon. Recommendation?
If you like this, buy the author a backlist,
a catalog, a setlist, breakfast
and/or any number of relevant consonants
to add to his pre-existing remnants
of salt-flavored sea shanties.
Chant along like forgotten little fishies.
One day you'll be a peg-legged old man
without a thought to stand on
or a deck to swab it out from under
as I plunder another summer
buried in a life of autumn sundries
nearing winter on writing's high seas.
You can't buy these. One hundred and eighty sheets-
spiral bound- on hand like a sword
'til it cracks and bleeds out every word
spoken in your head like it's my voice you heard
stuck on forward, fast and overboard.
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of somethin'
dark and untrustin'...when the poet publishes
who is he punishing? Who does she run from?
What are we made of? The trees we shade
         under
that become the paper our minds make of wonder
going on in the coves of every one of us?
Read deeper and discuss.
         Pirate, pirate.
Don't be a sentence. Don't simply be among.