?

Why do all poems begin with a question?

Does description die in the demonstrative?
Is interest inevitably interred without the interrogative?
The beauty, the wonder, is lost somehow
when everything is past tense, definitive.
Even when the punctuation pretends
to anchor meaning firm in every clause,
there are question marks coiling in the commas,
underscoring the similes, even surfacing in the spaces.

Perhaps such questions are too dignified, too elegant,
to bow to answers.
But what I mean to say is that I am ready:
Please, read. Ask your poem.

Nov 2009