This poem was written by Baron Wormser upon his reading at Phoenix Books on April 24, 2008.

Once I read in a Borders Bookstore
In a sea of shopping malls in New Jersey.
A man sat in the first row and pawed over
The poems he was going to read later during the open mic.
He never looked up at me but snorted occasionally
With vatic delight at his own precipitous genius.
The espresso machine in the rear of the café
Made troubled basso sounds like a dying cow.

I read in the café because the "events area"
Was hosting a talk on "Planning a Trust Fund."
My books for sale were under a table on which a slide
Projector sat and showed screens like "Your House--
Your Greatest Asset" and "Tomorrow Does Come."

A woman in the third row (there were only three rows)
Talked intermittently on a cell phone to someone named Yvette:
"Are you really staying in a hotel, Yvette?"
"You can get that much cheaper in Paramus."
"I can't believe you're still seeing that loser."
When people told her to be quiet, she said
That she liked to talk and listen to poetry
At the same time. She said it was "multi-sensory."
After the reading she came up to me and told me
She thought I was going to be a hick from Maine
But I turned out to be a Jewish intellectual.
She informed me that she was Jewish too that novelists were smarter
Than poets and that she had been to Europe eight times.
After the events director crawled under the Trust
Planning Table and brought my latest title back to the café,
She bought one of the two books that were sold that evening.

How sad am I to do these readings?
Just normal-aching-poet-sad?
Delmore-Schwartz-cornered-by-the-abyss sad?
Or cowardly? Afraid to be Sylvia-Plath-angry-sad
And barge through death's sullen door,
Sick of human idiocy, including my own?

Later in the evening when I have repaired
To the poetry section to gather my slender wits,
I consult the oracle Yeats.
He never drove on Interstates among convoys of 18-wheelers,
Never searched asphalt acres for a parking space
Around Christmas, never took a self-assertion seminar
Or credit management workshop in a fluorescent warehouse.
The chains of commerce never danced for him.

He stood for the soul's exactions, the flawed
Avid beauty of conscience. I read his poems
And feel better, which is to say, sadder.

© 2008 Baron Wormser. Reproduced with permission of the author.