NewPoetry

Ben Ladouceur

A young poet once told me, you get
one exclamation mark your whole career. Twenty years
passed and still

his name is not very known. Each morning, all summer,
I write the first line
of a different ode; together the lines tell a story

about suffering
the way a dull axe tells a story about septicemia.
Capably. The young poet

loved me
in order to make a different man suffer.
For a countryside summer, the different man suffered,

and wrote the worst poems of any of us,
his one exclamation mark
rotting like mutton in his pocket.

I no longer know these men
but when they come across the last and only exclamation
mark of my career,

I know they will interpret it as scorekeeper would
at the diamond. Interchangeable
with an asterisk. Great defensive play.